Dreams should be something intimate, something that is deeply yours, like thoughts and feelings experienced while asleep, particularly strongly associated with rapid eye movement sleep. The contents and purpose of dreams are poorly understood, though they have been a topic of speculation and interest throughout recorded history. But not anymore, 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 collaboration between artist Fernando Orellana and Computer Science Professor Brendan Burns of the Albany Regional Sleep Disorder Center, in New York.
“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.
“Sleep waking robot is a metaphor in which the robot is allowed to augment or act out human experience. Robots 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.
This is really amazing guys! Truly a work of art, continuing such unbelievable experiments’ will be the edge of biotechnology.
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