The head pillow consists of a body tracker, a microphone, and a pair of headphones. The body pillow contains an electric heating blanket and a subwoofer speaker in order to produce physical vibration. Along the bottom of the curtain there are fans. Onto each curtain there is a projection of colorful patterns generated by pumping of brightly colored liquid dyes into two thinly separated Plexiglas sheets. Also, the output device is backlit by a small spotlight. If one person starts moving around in the bed, the movement captured by the head pillow is communicated through an increase of the rate and intensity of the vibrations in the other’s body pillow. When one partner says something, a computer analyzes the quality of the audio in terms of amplitude (softness/loudness) and transmits it to the remote location. Additionally, it is visualized through colors projected onto the curtains. The audio analyzer differentiates spoken conversation from airy noises (e.g., breathing) and only transmits airy noises to the fans which reconstruct this event remotely through blowing the other’s curtains.
Source: Dodge, C. 1997. The bed. In Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems Looking to the Future (CHI’97). ACM Press, 371–372.
http://www.sigchi.org/chi97/proceedings/short-talk/cd.htm
