T H E A P P R O A C H

Control Lights for a Synchronized Sleep Routine

Corus is a connected lighting system designed to help couples align their sleep schedules. It consists of a main candle in the bedroom, satellite candles placed around the home, and a mobile app that syncs all the candles via the cloud. These candles are holographic projection votives linked to the home’s lighting system through Bluetooth, allowing users to control them via the app or through intuitive gestural inputs.

Corus calculates an optimal, shared bedtime for couples and subtly communicates the compromises each person is making through dynamic lighting cues on the holographic candles and mobile app.

Additionally, Corus integrates with social media, transforming relevant information into artistic visual displays—adding a touch of delight to the user's morning routine.
 

T H E S Y S T E M

How Corus Works

At Sunset, the candles light. Satellite candles around the home begin to flicker to notify the couple when bedtime is approaching. With gesture and using the app, the bedtime can be delayed.

As Bedtime Nears, the flames dim and the lights in the living area dim while the light and the candle in the bedroom remain bright. This nudges the couple to relocate to the bedroom. 

At Night, the main candle responses to the audio level of the conversation in the bedroom. As the conversation slows, the lights and the candle dim. Once the conversation stops, the candle burns out, and the lights turn off. Couples can also turn off the light by pinching out the flame.

As the Sun Rises, the holograph reappears: an animated waxy abstract sculpture of relevant things to the couple. The sculpture can be a birthday cake to celebrate spouse's birthday or today's weather to inform couples ahead.

T H E G E S T U R E

Gesture Interaction with Candles

Corus employs natural, intuitive, and form-specific gestural inputs for users to interact with the holographic candles. Users can interact with the candles in three ways: 

T H E D E S I G N

System for Dyadic Sleep Routine & Nighttime Conversations

The app primarily helps users set sleep goals and initial preferences. Additionally, it serves as a secondary notification for approaching bedtime and provides a dashboard with insights into evening conversation energy, dynamics, and volume.

VISUALIZING SLEEP COMPROMISE

The holographic candles themselves offer feedback to the users in their color. The candle’s color will be somewhere in the middle of these two hues. This helps the couples get a sense of the balance in their preferred schedules, in terms of who is getting closer to their preferred schedule and who might be making more of a compromise.

USER FLOW

Wireframes shows the entire user flow from the on-boarding process. The home screen leads to light controls for different rooms, to preference, and to conversation analysis. We also explored different notification types: a pop-up for when users are on their phone and a screensaver that lights up to notify you.

T H E R E S E A R C H

PHYSICAL & RELATIONSHIP HEALTH OF COUPLES

Among the family contexts, we decided to narrow in on cohabitating couples. The couples are going through transition that two individuals living together must develop new sleep routine. To address sleep consistency and quality, we looked closely at the physical and relationship healths of the couple through literature review, survey and target interviews.

Three sources of conflict emerged from our initial research:

1. incompatible sleep behaviors

2. different sleep cycles and patterns

3. balancing privacy and intimacy.

UTOPIAN AND DYSTOPIAN APPROACHES

Considering these three areas, we developed two provocative future scenarios, each based on the concepts of utopia and dystopia to elicit reactions from the users as well as gauge their level of comfort with technologies.

Dystopic: Allow individuals to continue living their own discordant patterns and behaviors
Utopic: Force a couple to find a place of harmony and balance

T H E F I N D I N G S

THE DYADIC SLEEP CYCLES CAUSE THE FEWEST PROBLEMS FOR COUPLES

Our research led to these three key insights about cohabiting couples in relation to their sleep and the time surrounding sleep. From there, we concretized key insights into actionable design principles.

C O N C E P T D E V E L O P M E N T

ITERATION THROUGH IDEA MATRIX

To generate many concepts quickly, we created a matrix by which we crossed sleep goals with various technologies. This helped us be creative and forward thinking about our appreciation of tech for our project. We were then able to affinity map these concepts and ultimately decide the final direction: focusing on dyadic sleep, with a secondary focus on night time conversation. After round of iterations, we arrived at our final concept, Corus- a holographic candle system that helps cohabiting couples become more synchronized in their sleep routines.

T H E P R O T O T Y P E

PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL PROTOTYPING

To test out our holographic candle, we created a Pepper's Ghost prototype and box as a demo of our holographic votive. This demonstrates how prismatic shapes can be used to project images we can appear three-dimensional. 

To generate a realistic candle flame and smoke, we have used Autodesk 3D Studio Max with FumeFX extension. For smoke, we used After Effects Trapcode extension.We have also experimented with RealFlow to create waxy animations of morning notifications. 

Finally, we have used Keyshot and Adobe After Effects to compose our effects, 3D renderings, and the shot footage.