Sleep on a Social Pillow

Hello Sleep Fans, I'm the Social Pillow!

The Ambient Social Pillow now in prototype status and created by some students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is not an alarm clock.

(Looks like we’re branching out here on the Alarm Clock Blog to delve into more and more matters that have to do with the subject of sleep in general…so be it.)

Instead, it’s an incredibly intelligent concept for interactive pillows that can communicate with one another.

Imagine that you are temporarily away from home on a business trip but have taken your pillow with you. As long as you have a wireless internet connection, your pillow could be in contact with your spouse’s pillow.

Uhhhh…I guess that means you’d better be faithful, huh?

That’s right, people, we’re talking about internet-connected smart pillows that can phone home!

The pillows themselves, in addition to being internet-capable, contain simple sensors that enable you to ‘draw’ designs on them with your fingers. These designs could be simple symbols or messages (such as the smiley face shown in the photo above). The symbols or messages would then be transmitted across the internet and received by your wife’s pillow.

The pillows are capable of sensing touch information, and displaying incoming touch data as a pattern of lights that show the outline “drawn” upon the remote pillow. Pillows can connect to each other over the network so that this sense of touch can be shared across long distances.

Honey, my pillow just called to say I love you, as the song goes…

The Geek-Like Guts of the Social Pillow

It’s a fascinating concept, and one that we think is pretty great, on the one hand, because it’s such a cool idea. On the other hand, isn’t there something creepy about your brain sleeping on an internet-connected pillow?

What’s next?

Will future versions of these pillows actively Twitter your dreams to your followers in an endless supply of dream-tweets?!!

Find out more about the Social Pillow on the MIT Project Page.

Hat’s off to Sajid Sadi, Pattie Maes and Amir Mikhak at MIT who created the Social Pillow:

you’re GEEKS like us, and we love you for it