The pinwheels project continues the study of Ambient Fixtures to communicate digital information at the periphery of human perception through ambient media. This project takes fields of pinwheels and explores what arrangements create interfaces that are intuitive and informative for the user while being an ambient source of information. Its other focus is on finding interesting application domains and ways to computationally map the information to the pinwheels. Its current application domains include stock market activity monitoring, web site hits tracking, natural wind movement, and server packet monitoring.
(Source: http://tangible.media.mit.edu/projects/pinwheels/)