A Robot that Reads Your Dreams and Dances Them!

Dreams should be something intimate, something that is deeply yours, like thoughts. But not any more with the Sleep Waking, a robot that can record your brainwave activity and REM sleep. The robot not only reads your dreams, but plays them back in an interpretive dance. The Sleep Waking robot is the fruit of a collaboration between artist Fernando Orellana and Computer Science Professor Brendan Burns of the Albany Regional Sleep Disorder Center, in New York.

Orellana himself experimented with the robot: the team wired him up and recorded data of his sleep physiology: brainwave activity (EEG, EKG) and REM (rapid eye movements).

"The eye position data we simply apply to the position the robot's heads is looking. So if my eye was looking left, the robot looks left. The use of the EEG data is a bit more complex. Running it through a machine learning algorithm, we identified several patterns from a sample of the data set (both REM and non-REM events). We then associated preprogrammed robot behaviors to these patterns. Using the patterns like filters, we process the entire data set, letting the robot act out each behavior as each pattern surfaces in the signal. Periods of high activity (REM) where associated with dynamic behaviors (flying, scared, etc.) and low activity with more subtle ones (gesturing, looking around, etc.). The 'behaviors' the robot demonstrates are some of the actions I might do (along with everyone else) in a dream," said Orellana.

The employed robot is a humanoid Kondo KHR-2HV.

"Sleep Waking robot is a metaphor in which the robot is allowed to augment or act out human experience. [R]obots are increasingly used to augment human experience. From robotic prosthetic devices, personalized web presences, and implanted RFID chips, technology is moving from being an externalized tool, to being a literal extension of who we are. By giving an example of and drawing attention to this process. We hope to give people the opportunity to think critically what personalized technology actually means," added Orellana.

The Sleep Waking will be seen in New York as part of the current Brainwave: Common Senses exhibition at Exit Art, running until April 19th (a video can be seen here).