Lucid Loop: A Virtual Deep Learning Biofeedback System for Lucid Dreaming Practice

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Can VR and neu­ro­feed­back deep learn­ing art help enhance atten­tion and lucid dream­ing practice?

Lucid dream­ing, know­ing one is dream­ing while dream­ing, is an impor­tant tool for explor­ing con­scious­ness and bring­ing aware­ness to dif­fer­ent aspects of life. We cre­ated a system called Lucid Loop: a vir­tual real­ity expe­ri­ence where one can prac­tice lucid aware­ness via neu­ro­feed­back. Visuals are cre­atively gen­er­ated before your eyes using a deep learn­ing Artificial Intelligence algo­rithm to emu­late the unsta­ble and ambigu­ous nature of dreams. The vir­tual envi­ron­ment becomes more lucid or “clear” when the participant’s phys­i­o­log­i­cal sig­nals (brain­waves) indi­cate focused atten­tion. Lucid Loop enables the vir­tual embod­ied expe­ri­ence of prac­tic­ing lucid dream­ing where writ­ten descrip­tions fail. It offers a valu­able and novel tech­nique for sim­u­lat­ing lucid dream­ing with­out having to be asleep. Future devel­op­ments will val­i­date the system and eval­u­ate its abil­ity to improve atten­tion and lucid­ity within the system by detect­ing and adapt­ing to a par­tic­i­pants focused atten­tion.

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Publications & Presentations

Kitson, Alexandra, Reese Muntean, Steve DiPaola, and Bernhard E. Riecke. 2023. “Exploring Introspection with Lucid Loop: A Neurofeedback-Augmented Immersive Experience.” In 26th Annual CyberPsychology, CyberTherapy & Social Networking Conference (CYPSY26), 1. Paris, France. https://easychair.org/smart-program/CYPSY26/2023–07-13.html.
Kitson, A. (2019, April 14). Lucid Loop: A Virtual Deep Learning Biofeedback System for Lucid Dreaming Practice. Medium. https://medium.com/acm-chi/lucid-loop-a-virtual-deep-learning-biofeedback-system-for-lucid-dreaming-practice-531f0dcf28a8
Kitson, Alexandra, Steve DiPaola, and Bernhard E. Riecke. 2019. “Lucid Loop: A Virtual Deep Learning Biofeedback System for Lucid Dreaming Practice.” Project Demo at Interactivity Hot Desk. ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Glasgow, United Kingdom, Glasgow, United Kingdom. (Download)
Kitson, Alexandra J., Reese Muntean, Steve DiPaola, and Bernhard E. Riecke. 2022. “Lucid Loop: Exploring the Parallels between Immersive Experiences and Lucid Dreaming.” DIS ’22 Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (ACM DIS ’22) (Australia), 1–16. (Download)
Kitson, Alexandra, Steve DiPaola, and Bernhard E. Riecke. 2019. “Lucid Loop: A Virtual Deep Learning Biofeedback System for Lucid Dreaming Practice.” Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Glasgow, United Kingdom), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3312952. (Download)