Assignment: Midterm Project 1: Group project proposal

Collaborators:

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Note: My collaborator on this is Mark Rosetta, who is not available on the drop-down list...

As Paul Dourish maintains in 2004’s Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, the push towards ubiquitous computing is occurring in two seemingly antithetical trajectories. The two, immersive Virtual Reality and embodied (tangible) technology, are antithetical means of achieving the same goal in that the site of the former is the “world of the system,” (Dourish) whereas the latter is the “world of the user” (Dourish). One attempt at reconciliation between the two is to reformulate their very division; perhaps ubiquitous computing is in fact the effort to systematize the world of the user. With this in mind, it is especially interesting to think of the aspects of the user’s world which seem utterly “unsystematizable,” or rather, the least tangible and/or embodied aspects of everyday life.

Dreams, it would seem, are one of the least tangible, and notoriously unsystematic human activities. Dreams are also an activity unique to the carbon-based; machines certainly do not dream. In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, we do not know if Deckard is human or android based upon his very ability to repeatedly dream of the white unicorn (the doubt concerns whether or not this very dream is the result of programming). We would not attempt to make dreams tangible, but rather seed some aspects of their creation in a project called Shared Dreaming.

Shared Dreaming could have two generations, one of them very possible within the world of TUIs, and one of them potentially only possible in the somewhat impossible world of science fiction. The more realistic apparatus would utilize our knowledge of ambient media as it creates information relays within the brain. Our object, called The Electric Sheep, could collapse distance between dreamers in that two willing sleepers in completely disparate parts of the world could program their respective Sheep to send out identical information. The four information outputs would align with the senses: one for sound (rather than generic ambient noise, the sound could be user-generated & user-specific, creating a more personally evocative experience), one for smell, one for temperature (say air humidifying/conditioning capabilities), and one for sight (as the eyes of the user are closed, this would basically be a light of varying color and intensity). Most people have already experienced the incorporation of some external stimuli into their dream world; the ringing of the alarm clock or someone calling your name transforms into the school bell  and the mother of the dream. The second[subsequent], more sci-fi, manifestation of Shared Dreaming is a sleep cap which could capture the REM waves and their precise location within the brain of a dreamer and transmit them to another sleep-cap, which would then recreate those patterns within the mind of the second dreamer.[1]

With our rudimentary understanding of dream creation, it is altogether possible (especially in the instance of The Electric Sheep) that actual identical dreams would never occur. Our hope is that the presence of identical external stimuli would prompt similar internal responses between two dreamers’ minds. There are also interesting relational issues at play; the sleep cap creates a clear hierarchy of dreamers, in which one dreamer dreams for the other. This might be desirable to some, and less so to others, which makes the need for more symbiotic sleep caps—ones for which information can pass equally between the two—evident. This hypothetical invention is also interesting in an evaluative sense; is such an object/technology desirable? Might people prefer dreams—as we’ve said, the respite of the non-machine—to remain un-mechanized and absolutely private?

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