DINESH SEEMAKURTY
Engineering from the Ground Up
Project Lucidity
The open source, fully featured,
DIY friendly, lucid dreaming mask
Sleep Actigraphy
What is Project Lucidity?
At its core, Project Lucidity is a sleep mask that helps you attain the elusive lucid dream. But this project is more than that. Its about taking the art of controlling your dreams and bringing it from a shaky phenomenon to a more understood science. To do so, Project Lucidity was designed as a fully featured, hobbyist and developer friendly, lucid dreaming mask that goes above and beyond.
Sleep is an awesome thing and the last thing you want is to be disturbed during your few hours of rest. Project Lucidity is built to communicate with your cell phone's accelerometer to only trigger when you are already asleep. Not when you are slightly asleep, but rather when you are so still that you could be borderline comatose. During your action packed dreams, your body paralyzes itself to prevent you from acting out those epic kung-fu moves in real life. In those beautiful moments of bliss, Project Lucidity will activate and aid in your metamorphosis from a measly dreamer to the key-bearer of your subconscious.
Visual Dream Cues
Attaining a lucid dream is tough work. Even with sleep cycle detection, your oblivious dreaming mind needs to reminded that you are in a psychotic hallucination inside your own head. Time to bring in the big guns. Eight super bright red LEDs will rhymtically blast photons through your eyelids to nudge you towards lucidity. By flashing these unique light patterns only when you are dreaming, the stimulus will show up as anomalies in your dream. Your brain is tricky though, it will incorporate this visual stimulus into your dream. You might start seeing police lights, feel like the sun keeps flickering, or for some reason a firefly wont stop dancing in your face. With practice, you will recognize these anomalies and realize when you are in a dream, allowing you to become lucid and control your dreams.
Light sleeper? No worries. Project Lucidity's LEDs are completely customizable. Just set the type of light pattern, the speed of the stimulus, and brightness of the LEDs so the light stimulus is unique to you. Completely tweakable for featherlight sleepers and those with extra-thick eyelids.
Wake up as nature intended
This mask is extremely straightforward. After a long day of anxiously waiting to finally try everything people told you could only do "in your dreams", the last thing you want is to worry about making your sleep mask work. Project Lucidity is true plug and play. Thats right. Plug in the transmitter to your fancy smartphone and run any alarm app that supports Project Lucidity. Turn on the mask, put it on, and go to bed. Thats it.
Changing the settings on the mask is a cinch. Simply select the different options right in the alarm app and Project Lucidity will take care of the rest. No need to poke at hidden buttons imbedded in the mask. So simple you can do it while cozied up in your favorite PJs.
Project Lucidity isn't only about catching those dream waves during the depths of your sleep. Rather it's a full sleep experience. We all know that nothing ruins a pleasant night in your premium 1000ct silk bedset than being slapped in the face by a screeching alarm clock. Yea that sucks. Throw that alarm clock away.
Project Lucidity will cradle you awake the way nature intended. By tracking your motion close to your set alarm time, your phone will tell Project Lucidity when you are naturally waking up from your deep sleep cycle. Remember that groggy feeling when you wake up to your jarring alarm clock? Thats because the alarm woke you up while deep in a sleep cycle. Before you slip into your next sleep cycle, Project Lucidity will gradually brighten daylight LEDs over the time to simulate a sunrise nudging you awake. Whether you wake up before the break of dawn or pass out till noon, this simulated sunrise will leave you feeling extraordinarily refreshed.
Simple to Use
Tinkerer/Hacker Friendly
This lucid dreaming mask is built to be messed with. Engineered using the ATMEGA328p on a 8mhz resonator, this mask is fully compatible with the Arduino IDE. The project is rechargable and reprogrammable using the built in micro-usb port so you can make it completely your own. In addition, the API to communicate with the mask makes developing for the mask extremely simple. Project Lucidity was built for any alarm app developer or anyone interested in sleep tracking to incorporate this project into their new or existing product.
