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Traditionally, computer interfaces have been confined to conventional displays and focused activities. However, as displays become embedded throughout our environment and daily lives, increasing numbers of them must operate on the periphery of our attention. Peripheral displays, ubiquitous computing devices that present information without demanding attention, are difficult to build, particularly because they must dynamically manage the cognitive load they place on users. We present a toolkit that aids the development of peripheral displays. We determined three key issues for the toolkit, based on a survey of existing peripheral displays and cognitive science literature: abstraction of data, selection of notification levels, and transitions between notification levels.

Tara Matthews. “Peripheral Display Toolkit: A toolkit for managing user attention in peripheral displays.” Masters of Science Thesis, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, 2004.

Tara Matthews, Anind K. Dey, Jennifer Mankoff, Scott Carter, Tye Rattenbury. “A toolkit for managing user attention in peripheral displays.” In Proceedings of the 17th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST). Santa Fe, NM, pp. 247-256, 2004.

Tara Matthews, Tye Rattenbury, Scott Carter, Jen Mankoff, Anind Dey. "A Peripheral Display Toolkit." University of California, Berkeley Technotes, UCB//CSD-03-1258, 2003.
*Note: the architecture described in this technote is very out-dated. The motivation and literature survey are still useful.

To install the PTK:

• Install Java
• Download the most recent PTK Release as a zip file or from its Sourceforge CVS repository.
• Set your Java build path to include the following jar files (included in the PTK release zip file): Phidgets.jar, orb.jar, synesynth.jar

• Install Java Media Framework(JMF), and Java Advanced Imaging (JAI).
• Camera support in the PTK uses the Java Media Framework. To use a camera with JMF, first run the JMRegistry application.

• Install Phidgets Bridge2Java.

• Install a CVS client. We recommend Eclipse as an IDE (stable build version 3.0M6 or higher); it provides integrated CVS support.
• Open Eclipse -> Windows -> Open Perspective -> CVS Repository
• Host: cvs.pdtk.sourceforge.net
• Repository Path: /cvsroot/pdtk
• Go to Windows -> Preferences -> Team -> CVS -> SSH2 ConnectionMethod and check the Enable SSH protocol version 2 support option (make sure your Eclipse version is 3.0M6 stable build or higher )
• If you have a SourceForge account, enter your username and password, with Connection Type: extssh
• If you do not have a SourceForge account, enter "anonymous" as the username with Connection Type: pserver
  
• See this document for more information on how to access SourceForge CVS.

• ptk
• ptk.input
• ptk.abstraction
• ptk.notification
• ptk.output
• ptk.transition

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS - 0205644. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

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