FryingMan's EILD (Halovision) experiments
Well I've finally gotten off my duff and taken action in my goal to learn about and create my own EILD systems. I've been thinking and dreaming (haha) of pursuing this for years, and I've finally taken the first major steps. First up is working with IAmCoder's Halovsion set-up. Massive thanks and shout-out to IAmCoder for hand-holding me extensively and patiently through the process of acquiring the equipment and setting it up to run with his LucidScribe system.
This system works by using a night-vision camera (non-contact, off to the side of the bed) to detect tiny and large movements during sleep and to combine these detections with knowledge of how REM works to infer that the user is dreaming, and to send one of any number of possible signals (sound being easiest) to either wake for DEILD or to promote lucidity (DILD).
I have the system up and running. It's not very good yet in detecting my eye movements in the dark, at least in bed. From what I've seen so far I seem to twitch my cheeks in REM more than move my eyes! RCM! Much more experimentation with placement, distance, sensitivity, etc. is required. I also end up playing with the system deep into the night so have not had any epic dreaming nights with REM cycles after 6 hours of sleep with it yet.
In addition to the main REM notifications, I have plans for: WBTB notifications (helps you catch inter-sleep-cycle wakings, whether you're getting up for a full WBTB or just doing a micro-WBTB), sleep cycle count displays (which cycle of the night are you currently in), sleep clock (starts at 00:00 at bedtime), delay notifications (push a button, go to sleep, and a notification is signaled in some number of minutes/seconds, a button to toggle on/off all pending notifications (a problem with current EILD systems is having a way to easily and *quickly* turn the entire system on and off without having to get up and work at the computer or length settings, which can wake you up too much).
I'm really excited to get going on all this!
Here's my setup:
http://i65.tinypic.com/bdu0qp.jpg
http://i66.tinypic.com/s2wu4w.jpg