"Ambient technologies" are supposed to make streams of variable information noticeable without being intrusive, and are a clever method for "making the invisible visible." They're designed to remain at the periphery of one's perception, notable only when the monitored conditions (the weather outside, power consumption, a child's location, email status, etc.) changes. We noted the Ambient Orb awhile back, which while interesting, suffers from only responding to a small number of different inputs from a subscription-only proprietary wireless frequency. Now the Register (a UK technology website) notes that British Telecom is showing off their own ambient display, which reads whatever assigned data over plain old 802.11 WiFi. It looks like it's a technology demo, not a product preview, which is unfortunate; ambient displays and WiFi seem like a perfect combination.

(Via Engadget)