The Ambient Birdhouse

A key technology developing through the Ambient Nature Network is the Ambient Birdhouse:

The Ambient Birdhouse is an interactive presentation device delivering sounds and videos using a Raspberry Pi computer, an RFID reader, and an attached touch screen and speaker, housed in a wooden frame reminiscent of a birdhouse.

Users have three points of interaction with content:

  • The BH website, which enables uploading, sharing, and commenting on videos, as well as choosing which videos to add to a local Birdhouse.
  • RFID cards that could be assigned videos, and then tapped to the Birdhouse casing to play the video. A special RFID card could also be used to switch ‘channels’.
  • The BH touchscreen, which could be used to play and scrub through visualisations of long-duration acoustic recordings.

Work exploring the use of the Ambient Birdhouse within families and communities can be found here:

Alessandro Soro, Margot Brereton, Tshering Dema, Jessica L. Oliver, Min Zhen Chai, Aloha May Hufana Ambe. 2018. The Ambient Birdhouse: An IoT device to discover birds and engage with nature. In Proceedings of the CHI ’18: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Montreal, Canada. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173971

Tshering Dema, Margot Brereton, Michael Esteban, Alessandro Soro, Sherub Sherub, Paul Roe. 2020. Designing in the network of relations for species conservation: The playful Tingtibi community Birdhouse. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Honolulu, HI, USA. 1–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376713

Kellie Vella, Michael Esteban, Bernd Ploderer, Margot Brereton, Networked Gardens: Remediating Local Nature Data Through the Internet of Things, in Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2022, Association for Computing Machinery: Virtual Event, Australia. p. 1597–1611. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533497