Editorial: Re-thinking the future of semantic ambient media

Abstract

The term ‘ambient media’ is new in the field of media research in the context of smart and intelligent systems. As far the term was relating to advertising, but it’s meaning goes far beyond. In ambient media, the natural environment is the media, and media objects are rendered throughout rather than on dedicated devices. Ambient media are ‘intelligent’ and react pro-actively to users—therefore we can refer to them as semantic ambient media. Ambient media underlie five basic principles: manifestation, morphing, intelligence, collaboration, and experience (see e.g. [1, 4, 5] or [3] for further reading). Within this special issue we focus on the investigation of ambient media and their characteristics in one article analyzing the other accepted five articles. Several articles adds either a human, technical, or philosophical viewpoint on ambient media. The paper contributed by A. Scherp et al., entitled “A core ontology on events for representing occurrences in the real world” presents an ontology for the modeling of realworld events, and how they can be mapped to the digital overlay. B. Pogorelc et al. apply ambient media technology in a health care syste, recognizing health problems automatically. The ambient assisted living system shall prolong the autonomous living of the elderly. P. Codognet et al. approach ambient media from a audial viewpoint, and present a media installation, which generate sound spaces generated by self-organized agents. R.D. Vatavu et al. devote their research work to interactive surfaces and how emotional responses and Multimed Tools Appl (2012) 58:289–292 DOI 10.1007/s11042-011-0899-6