Oct 29 2009
Product innovation firm collaborates with leading provider of information-rich ambient displays
Altitude, Inc., the award-winning product innovation firm, has joined with Ambient Devices on a new design platform for its family of information display products, which includes two recently announced sports and weather trackers: Centerfield Baseball ScoreCaster™ and the Cirrus 7-Day Weather Forecaster™. The two new products are dedicated, wireless displays that provide instant, effortless access to data—without a PC or Internet connection. Altitude’s innovation lies in the platform approach to Ambient’s product line. One product architecture accommodates a wide range of product variants, and the design language creates a visual cohesiveness to the whole offering—thus reducing part count, manufacturing costs and inventory complexity.
Altitude, Inc. created a new core design for Ambient Devices' new Cirrus 7-Day Forecaster
With their client’s powerful visual identity in mind, Altitude paid homage to Ambient’s “Orb,” an iconic product that reflects changing information by ‘glowing’ different colors. Altitude provided visual continuity with the Orb in these new products by creating a subtle, blended ‘dome’ that glows in the same way for the Ambient logo. This new logo dome illuminates and shifts color to signify changing conditions such as a new baseball score or a temperature drop. In addition, the dome lights up when a new message is received through InTouch Messaging™, a new Ambient service which supports direct-to-device messaging via email or web interface.
Citing the respective strengths of both companies, Brian Matt, Altitude’s Founder and CEO, reflected upon the collaboration:
“Ambient Devices needed a design language and product platform that reflected the excitement of the original Orb. At the same time, they needed an intuitive core platform that would make large volumes of information easy to see. Baseball ScoreCaster and Cirrus 7-Day Weather Forecaster are the first fruits of our collaboration. We hope that consumers will appreciate the ways in which they make the information most important to them available at a glance.”
Andrew Boch, vice president, Ambient Brand, shared his perspective: “Ambient Devices are about instant, effortless access to information. Altitude took the presentation of that information to a new level—providing a clean, seamless look which effectively highlights information and minimizes the visible frame. Additionally, their core design is extensible and flexible, allowing us to ‘build once, deploy many times’—optimizing time-to-market and BOM while maintaining exceptional performance.”