Lucid Dreaming App for iPhone announced!

GUI prototype

iPhone App Development Begins!

 

It is worth the wait…

Prepare to have your senses delighted by the new generation of entertainment. Lucid Dreaming App for iPhone 4 blends technology and art. Light and Darkness, awareness and dreams. It pushes awareness to it’s very limit by offering an exquisite experience of stylish UI, compelling audio and the most advanced lucid dreaming tricks known to man. It redefines art for the 21st century by fusing science, engineering and math with the elusive qualities of style, music, and awareness. The app reflects the inner spark of the core artists.  Oh, and it’s also your phone! Except you get to take it with you in your dreams, where you can use your awareness to transmute it from a humble flashlight to a mighty lightsaber! That’s right… A lightsaber!

Check out this link to a companion product for the app:

 

 

 

I’m very excited to announce that I’m back in the game! After a painstaking process of getting an iOS development environment set up, I finally got it working. Currently I’m porting the Lucid Dreaming App for Android over to iPhone 4! It feels really good. I’m solving tough technical problems and am learning something new every day. Today I realized that this is the very definition of being “high on life”

Lessons Learned from Android

Since I first started this project, I’ve learned a lot about smartphones, actigraphy, and most importantly the target audience! My original vision of the app turned out to be wrong. Even for the techy Android audience, the app was too complicated. What the lucid dreaming app should be is a simple program that the user turns on before going to sleep. The program augments the fading consciousness and reminds the user to become lucid. I intend to apply all these to the development of a great application!

I expect the following features to make it into the app:

1. New App Mode: Dreams Detector. This is what you’ve been waiting for in a lucid dreaming app: a brand new algorithm induced three “In your face” dreamsigns in a single night of testing!  That’s 3 potential lucid dreams, clearly linked to using the app. 
2. Brand new induction technique combining Reality checks and dreamsigns. You got to experience it to believe it! The details are still being worked out, but one thing is certain: There’s nothing else like this on the market!
3. Custom hypnosis and affirmation script. Yes, the app now uses the power of hypnosis to help you achieve your lucid dreaming goals! This short script is to be read out loud before bed, and it works in conjunction with features 1 and 2. [caption id="attachment_655" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Lessons Learned from Android: Just let it calibrate. The easiest calibration ever!"][/caption]

4. Sleep scoring with 2 sensors - much more accurate actigraphy, which lets the phone know when you are asleep and not!
5. Faster data sampling with higher resolution - will help analyze data obtained after 4-8 hours of sleep, exactly when most REM happens!
6. Simpler calibration and setup. I can actually fix bugs and test fixes on my iPhone 4, as opposed to hearing about bugs on 400 different Android devices! I’m talking about you, Motorola Droid and Samsung Galaxy S!
7. Simpler design, less customization options, more streamlined user experience. iPhone controls look good with minimum customization.
8. Sleep Phase Aware Smart Timer – As Android version, the app will take into account the time it takes for you to fall asleep, bathroom breaks, etc before playing reminders.
9. Smart Alarm clock - wakes you up, ready to get out of bed. No more snoozing for hours!
10. Effective WILD Timer to make the most out of your WILD attempts and keep you awake for longer
11. Quality iPhone speakers mean crystal clear, loud audio, powerful enough to penetrate sleep and enter dreams.
12. Newbie friendly links and instructions

New App mode: Dreams Detector

It does what the name suggests: detects the onset of your dreams, waits for the dream to stabilize and plays a reminder. I do not know how your brain will integrate the reminder into the dream content. Here’s a quote from my dream journal after using the Dream Detector:

Suddenly the dream changed. One of my friends pulled out his phone and started talking about lucid dreaming. He said that it can happen at any moment, and you have to stay aware and do the reality check, even if you are completely sure you are in reality

The funny thing is that I was dreaming at that very moment! I thought : “Yeah, that’s cool, I’ll do that”!

Early alpha screenshot of the app on iPhone 4. Red spikes contribute to acitivity count

New Sensor: Gyroscope

Unlike the Android version, the iPhone app will take advantage of both accelerometer and Gyroscope, and will have some of the cleanest activity count data available! This is because iOS4 can provide accelerometer readings as user acceleration, and after running the data through a Kalman filter, the result is a very clean, 0 activity count at rest, with ~500 activity count during motion in bed.

Another feature of iOS4 devices is the Gyroscope. This device measures rotation of the device along the X,Y and Z axis. This kind of sensor picks up some of the data which the accelerometer is not sensitive enough to display adequately.

Faster data analysis

From my experiments with the Lucid Dreaming App on Android, it became evident that sampling actigraphy data in 1 minute epochs does not provide enough resolution for detailed analysis. This is especially obvious later in the night, when activity picks up, and the graph may look very jittery. This prevents me from fully understanding what’s happening to my body as I sleep.

. To do so, I’m developing a different sleep scoring algorithm, based on Cole’s sleep score algorithm used by the original app.

Quality Audio

Unlike my HTC HD2, the iPhone has very good pair of speakers near the base of the phone, which may be heard in another room when playing at a decent volume. This is a striking difference to the HD2, which only has a single speaker, producing very lackluster results, especially at night. On several occasions I listened to the reminders played while awake, and I knew what it should say, but it still sounded garbled. (Possible dream sign?)

My first paid app!

I’ve poured my heart and soul into the Lucid Dreaming App for Android. That app delivered many of the features that left long term lucid dreamers and novices alike recommending the app to their friends.

The initial high of creation is long gone. And so I’m going to try a different thing: a 3 to 5$ paid app with discounts for the lucid dreaming community. I’m hoping that a small income from the app sales would keep me more interested in the long term, and will result in a superior product. Without that, It’s hard to justify hundreds of dollars of investments that I made into the iOS development environment and the 85$ iPhone bill I get every month