Idea-1

Pillow++: A Shape-Changing Dream-Visualization Pillow
for Augmenting Awareness of Dream

"It is said that 'a virtuous man seldom dream'.
Fortunately, I am but an ordinary man.
I dream my own dream."

Preface

"...one cannot properly describe human life unless one bathes it in the sleep into which it plunges night after night and which sweeps round it as a promontory is encircled by the sea…" — Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, 1920

Background: Lucid Dream

Dream, is a strange, forgotten country of our mind. Lucid dream, is a type of dream in which the dreamer becomes aware that they are dreaming while dreaming. a type of dream in which the dreamer becomes aware that they are dreaming while dreaming. In an an ancient Chinese text, there is a story called "The Butterfly Dream". Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know that he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn't know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou.

Motivation

The evidence points toward an important function of dreams: to help us take the sting out of our painful emotional experiences during the hours we are asleep, so that we can learn from them and carry on with our lives. Although dreams are important, people seldomly pay attention to their dreams. In this case, I would like to make the implicit dream relatively prcevice with tangible interfaces to arouse people’s awareness of their dream. But, currenly, I am not very sure how to leveage this tangible patterns with pillow.

Visualization of Signals

The evidence points toward an important function of dreams: to help us take the sting out of our painful emotional experiences during the hours we are asleep, so that we can learn from them and carry on with our lives. Although dreams are important, people seldomly pay attention to their dreams. In this case, I would like to make the implicit dream relatively prcevice with tangible interfaces to arouse people’s awareness of their dream.

Interactive Wall with Pillow++

I wander people might able to interact with their dream. In this case, I can make the pillow interactive. To illustrate, I can put all pillows on the wall. And when people walk around, the pillow can show different shapes to interact with people.

Scene Design

If I can made many pillow walls, then I can build a whole interactive devices, which is shown in figure.

Idea-2

PillowTele: Pillows with Ultrasound Phased Array for Collective Memories Augmentation in Remote

The act of recalling is an important element of many interpersonal activities, especially for people who have close relationships but do not live in the same physical space. When recalling, sharing, and reviewing memories of life experiences, people often use a variety of objects as memory Aids. Most memory carriers are in the form of sound, photos and video. For example, a couple who has been apart for a long time might look at photos from the time while talking on the phone and reminisce about the good times they embraced.

However, The emotional atmosphere of the ecstasy moment in an intimate relationship is said to be tangible with the feeling of touch. Moreover, in this kind of moment, language is sometimes too pale to convey the inner feelings and the love towards the loved person. In this case, there is a missed opportunity to use a haptic way to record the shared moment and share the feeling of missing when being apart.

In this case, we present a haptic pillow with three ultrasound-phased arrays that can encode the shared moment into haptic feedback. Specially, we assume that there will be three main kinds of information: 1) the sound from the environment (e.g., movies, music, the noise of the scenes); 2) the spoken communication of human-human; and 3) the non-spoken communication such as body language. Considering the nature of the sound is also the wavelength that can be encoded into haptic feedback, we use one ultrasound-phased array to encode one kind of the main information. When they are apart, one person can click the button to trigger another person's pillow to give the pre-saved haptic feedback to trigger the past memory.

Specially, I would like to use IMU to sense the body movement and used the micophone to record the sound (e.g., sound from the enviorment, chatting voice), and then use ultrasonic transmitter to give feedback.

Spoiler Alert Klaxon

Although I put forward two ideas in the first week, neither of them is my final project. What a change of plans!

Email

yzihan@media.mit.edu