Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Dream engineering is an emerging field within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) that uses interactive systems to monitor sleep stages and deliver sensory stimuli to influence dream content for human well-being. Existing systems face two key limitations: 1) for sensing, the absence of deployable systems with laboratory-grade sleep staging capability creates a barrier to translating dream science into everyday contexts, and 2) for stimulation, reliance on single or limited sensory modalities fails to approximate the multimodal nature of naturalistic dreams. We present Dreamware, a brain-computer-interfaced multisensory capsule room addressing both limitations. The system integrates a hydrogel-based, flexible EEG wearable with a high-accuracy sleep-staging algorithm targeting N1 and REM sleep. Dreamware delivers synchronized, closed-loop stimulation across five sensory modalities: auditory, olfactory, visual, somatosensory, and thermoceptive. This work presents the first out-of-the-lab dream engineering system to achieve laboratory comparable sleep staging alongside coordinated multimodal stimulation, advancing dreaming as a programmable design space for HCI.
Fang, X., Li, D., Zhou, T., Vranic-Peters, M., Semertzidis, N., Wang, C., Zhu, Y., Mueller, F., Horowitz, A., Whitmore, N., Bu, J. Dreamware: A Brain-Computer-Interfaced Multisensory Capsule Room for Dream Engineering. CHI 2026. Posters. ACM.
Dream engineering is an emerging field within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) that uses interactive systems to monitor sleep stages and deliver sensory stimuli to influence dream content for human well-being. Existing systems face two key limitations: 1) for sensing, the absence of deployable systems with laboratory-grade sleep staging capability creates a barrier to translating dream science into everyday contexts, and 2) for stimulation, reliance on single or limited sensory modalities fails to approximate the multimodal nature of naturalistic dreams. We present Dreamware, a brain-computer-interfaced multisensory capsule room addressing both limitations. The system integrates a hydrogel-based, flexible EEG wearable with a high-accuracy sleep-staging algorithm targeting N1 and REM sleep. Dreamware delivers synchronized, closed-loop stimulation across five sensory modalities: auditory, olfactory, visual, somatosensory, and thermoceptive. This work presents the first out-of-the-lab dream engineering system to achieve laboratory comparable sleep staging alongside coordinated multimodal stimulation, advancing dreaming as a programmable design space for HCI.
Fang, X., Li, D., Zhou, T., Vranic-Peters, M., Semertzidis, N., Wang, C., Zhu, Y., Mueller, F., Horowitz, A., Whitmore, N., Bu, J. Dreamware: A Brain-Computer-Interfaced Multisensory Capsule Room for Dream Engineering. CHI 2026. Posters. ACM.
