(photos (cc) by eecue and decade_null, found on Flickr)
A couple of years ago I wrote about an idea I had for visualizing the implicit heat maps in Wifi signal strength using actual heat.
I never made the device, but I thought about what the ideas it was pointing at and generalized this as an observation I called "new data for old senses" and wrote some notes about it that I never shared here. Today PT at Makezine posted a link to a project along the lines that I was thinking about. It's a Wifi sensor that uses vibration to give you a sense of the Wifi landscape around you without having to look at anything, which was the crux of my idea in 2005. So, since the idea is now out there, here are my notes:
Well, there's the sense of smell, or olfaction, that you haven't mentioned, as far as I can see. Jofish Kaye, while at MIT Media Lab, wrote a thesis and built several olfactory displays. At Telenor Research & Innovation, we also built an olfactory display, used as a presence indicator in a SmartHome. I wrote a brief, informal review in 2002 about "Smelly interfaces", and added som preliminary guidelines. Olfactory displays have limitations, both with respect to the production of smells and with respect to the types of information that can be represented, but it is still interesting for "background information", as ambient displays.