Dormio

Interfacing with dreams

Motivation

Can we use our sleep as a creative resource? Despite the fact that we spend a significant portion of our lives asleep, the majority of HCI technological advancements, including those related to creativity, cater to our waking states of mind. This leaves out the potential to tap into unique and imaginative cognitive processes occurring during dreams. Hypnagogia, the semi-lucid state just before we enter become fully unconscious, is a state enabling thoughts to flow freely and effortlessly. Famous figures such as Salvador Dalí and Nikola Tesla among others, were able to tap into this state by holding a steel ball in their hand as they went to nap. As the ball slipped from their grasp, they would wake up during their hypnagogic state and capture their creative insight.

What we did

In this project, we replicated the function of the steel ball with a wearable device worn in the hand: Dormio. By tracking biometric signals, Dormio can prompt interactions on other devices such as phones or voice-based agents. Through these interactions, we explored the possibility of enhancing human creativity by suggesting information during semi-lucid states and checking its influence as measured through standardized creativity metrics.

Contributions

Research design, Ethnographic field studies, Digital ethnography, Qualitative data analysis, Field methods design.

I was involved at the beginning of this project and helped designing and running the field experiments leading to the first academic publications on Dormio. I helped exploring the business case for Dormio as a fellow at the DesignX Accelerator program. This is a highly collaborative effort led by Adam Haar Horowitz. You can learn more about it in the project’s website.

Collaborators

Adam Haar Horowitz, Ishaan Grover, Oscar Rosello, Tomás Vega. MIT Media Lab, Fluid Interfaces Group, Personal Robots Group

Press

MIT Researchers Have Developed a ‘System for Dream Control’. Motherboard

Can artificial intelligence create Art? BBC

“Making ideas into reality at MIT's "Future Factory”. CBS 60 minutes

Controlling Your Dreams: MIT Media Lab Using Dream Guidance Devices to Augment Human Creativity. Core77

Dormio: una plataforma para controlar los sueños. El Espectador

Outputs

Haar Horowitz, A., Grover, I., Reynolds-Cuéllar, P., Breazeal, C., & Maes, P. (2018). Dormio: Interfacing with Dreams. Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–10.

Lee, C. H., Lockton, D., Verweij, D., Kirk, D., Rogage, K., Durrant, A., Ball, A., Desjardins, A., Horowitz, A. H., Grover, I., Reynolds-Cuéllar, P., Rosello, O., Vega, T., Jain, A., Breazeal, C., & Maes, P. (2018). Demo hour. Interactions, 25(6), 10–13.