It’s not often that a truly new and innovative app comes along, one that does something really different to the thousands that have gone before it. But the Ibis Sleep Art app does just that.
Developed by the Ibis hotel chain in collaboration with BETC Digital, this app grew from Ibis’s 2011/2012 company-wide re-branding exercise and its determination that every customer in every hotel would experience a good night’s sleep.
In an experiment in October 2012, Ibis hooked up one of its trademark Sweet Beds to eighty sensors and a robotic arm holding a paint brush. As the customer slept, the arm – in real-time – created a piece of artwork of paint on canvas that charted the sleeper’s breathing and movement patterns throughout the night. The experiment was so successful that Ibis and BETC Digital have teamed up with Apple to create the Ibis Sleep Art App.
The premise is surprisingly simple; the iPhone user downloads the Sleep Art app, sets the Sleep Art alarm for the next morning, connects the phone to its charger and places the phone on the mattress beside them. The app runs throughout the night. The iPhone’s hyper-sensitive accelerometer monitors breathing, sound and movement, with each of these creating swirls and blazes of light in real-time so that when the sleeper awakes the next morning, their night’s sleep is displayed to them as a digital work of art, unique and surprisingly delicate.
A completely different work of art will be created each night and these are automatically saved to the device’s gallery; a user can therefore compare each night’s rest and, because they are created in real-time, users can fast-forward through the image’s creation to see how various episodes in their sleep were created.
If they know they woke up, for instance, they can see what effect on the artwork that had and even gauge how long it took them to fall asleep again.
The app is available for download now – for free – from the Apple Store. It is compatible with the latest iPhone models and iOS5 and iOS6 operating systems. The images can be shared via email , Facebook and twitter.
