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, A., DiPaola, S., & Riecke, B. E. (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. (Download)
Kitson, A. J., Muntean, R., DiPaola, S., & Riecke, B. E. (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), 1–16. (Download)