The term ‘ambient media’ is new in the field of media research in the context of smart and intelligent systems. As far the term was relating to advertising, but it’s meaning goes far beyond. In ambient media, the natural environment is the media, and media objects are rendered throughout rather than on dedicated devices. Ambient media are ‘intelligent’ and react pro-actively to users—therefore we can refer to them as semantic ambient media. Ambient media underlie five basic principles: manifestation, morphing, intelligence, collaboration, and experience (see e.g. [1, 4, 5] or [3] for further reading). Within this special issue we focus on the investigation of ambient media and their characteristics in one article analyzing the other accepted five articles. Several articles adds either a human, technical, or philosophical viewpoint on ambient media.

The paper contributed by A. Scherp et al., entitled “A core ontology on events for representing occurrences in the real world” presents an ontology for the modeling of real-world events, and how they can be mapped to the digital overlay. B. Pogorelc et al. apply ambient media technology in a health care syste, recognizing health problems automatically. The ambient assisted living system shall prolong the autonomous living of the elderly. P. Codognet et al. approach ambient media from a audial viewpoint, and present a media installation, which generate sound spaces generated by self-organized agents. R.D. Vatavu et al. devote their research work to interactive surfaces and how emotional responses and interactions allow new modalities for self-expression and emotional communication. A. Lugmayr has a more theoretical approach towards ambient media. He discusses the aspect of intelligence and wisdom in ambient media by applying Peirce’s categories as framework.

A very specific feature of this special issue is a sixth article, which discusses and analyzes several articles that compile this special issue to provide a red-line through the discussed issues. Additional background literature, as e.g. [7] acted as input for this specific article.

For further reading or joining actively the activities for making ambient media reality, we would like to refer to activities as the Ambient Media Association (see http://www.ambientmediaassociation.org), the Semantic Ambient Media (SAME) workshop series (see e.g. [2] or [6]), or the Nokia Ubimedia MindTrek Award (see http://www.mindtrek.org/ubimedia). We wish to give the reader new perspectives on this newly emerging field.