Ambient devices are new genre of consumer electronics, characterized by their ability to be perceived at-a-glance (also called "glanceable").

Ambient devices utilize pre-attentive processing to display information, the ability for the brain to percieve information without any apparent cognitive load. The New York Times Magazine announced ambient devices as one of the Ideas of the Year in 2002 on the heels of a start-up company, Ambient Devices of Cambridge, MA, releasing their first product Ambient Orb. The Ambient Orb maps information to a linear color spectrum and displays the trend in the data.

Research on ambient devices and ambience began at Xerox Parc with a paper co-written by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown entitled Calm Computing. Associated fields include Ubiquitous computing (also known as Ubicomp) and Calm technology. Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was a flagship research division of the Xerox Corporation, based in Palo Alto, California, USA, which essentially created the modern personal computer paper paradigm. ... Mark Weiser (July 23, 1952 - April 27, 1999) was a chief scientist of Xerox PARC and widely considered to be the father of Ubiquitous computing (also known as Ubicomp) and Calm technology: Weiser was born in Chicago, Illinois. ... Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp, or sometimes ubiqcomp) integrates computation into the environment, rather than having computers which are distinct objects. ... During one of Marks talks, he outlined a set of principles for ubiquitous computing: The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else. ...