Inspiration
Dreamscape was inspired by personal experiences with dreams and how vivid, creative, and sometimes meaningful they can be. One of our friends once had such a detailed and imaginative dream that she eventually turned it into a story and began writing it as a book. Another friend shared a dream where all the different characters in her life appeared together in one surreal narrative. She said some dreams made her mood positive the whole morning.
These moments fascinated us. Dreams often feel powerful and creative, yet most of them disappear from memory within minutes of waking up. This made us wonder: what if there was a system that could capture and visualize these dreams before they fade away?
From this thought came the idea of Dreamscape — a system that could help people capture, reflect on, and potentially use their dreams to better understand themselves and support their mental wellbeing.
What it does
Dreamscape is a mixed-reality dream exploration experience designed for a AR/VR headset. Instead of reading a dream journal on a flat screen, users enter a spatial dream interface where their dreams appear as floating elements, stats and replays of the dream environments around them.
The system transforms the user's room into a calm dream cosmos. Each dream becomes a visual story that users can open, replay, and explore. The goal is not only to remember dreams but also to help users reflect on emotions, patterns, and experiences that may influence their wellbeing.
Dreamscape turns something abstract and fleeting — dreams — into something visible, interactive, and reflective.
How we built it
We designed Dreamscape as a spatial mixed-reality interface using Figma and Figma Make to prototype futuristic UI concepts.
Our process included:
- Understanding brief, Brainstorming topics and ideating to select the best ones, furthur narrowing it down to one
- Interviewing multiple users, Researching the psychological side of dreams
- Brainstorming dream-related experiences and use cases and finally lo-fi sketches of wireframes
- Using Figma Make prompts to generate immersive interface concepts
- Iterating on layouts to create a surreal, dreamlike UI system
- Designing spatial interfaces suitable for AR/VR glasses
A key part of our process was learning how to write clear and structured prompts for Figma Make. By refining our prompts, we were able to generate designs that closely matched the immersive environments we imagined. This approach allowed us to prototype a complex mixed-reality concept much faster.
Challenges we ran into
One of the biggest challenges was that we initially started with a completely different topic. However, as we went deeper into research, we realized that the idea was not what we had envisioned. This meant we had to restart our process and rethink the project from scratch and out of the box.
Another challenge was that designing for dreams is inherently abstract. Unlike traditional apps with clear workflows, dreams are emotional, surreal, and unpredictable. Translating that into an interface required a lot of imagination and brainstorming.
We spent hours exploring how dreams could be visualized in spatial form and how users could interact with something as intangible as memories without much cognitive load. Managing time between ideation, planning, design, slides and the video was also a challenge, especially while rebuilding the concept.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One of our biggest accomplishments was successfully transforming an abstract concept like dreams into a tangible interface experience.
We are also proud of:
- Designing a spatial UI concept for AR glasses - this was something we hadn't worked on before
- Creating a dream-cosmos interface system
- Learning and applying prompt-based design using Figma Make
- Turning personal experiences into a meaningful design concept
Despite restarting the project midway, we were able to develop a clear idea and build an immersive prototype that reflects our vision.
What we learned
This project taught us several valuable lessons.
We learned how to:
- Translate abstract ideas into interface systems
- Design for emerging technologies like mixed reality
- Write effective prompts for AI-assisted design tools like Figma Make
- Iterate quickly when ideas evolve
More importantly, we learned that sometimes the best ideas come from personal experiences and curiosity. By observing everyday moments — like conversations about dreams — we discovered a concept worth exploring.
What's next for DreamScape
In DreamScape, we could explore Lucid Dream Preparation, helping users gently train their minds before sleep to recognize when they are dreaming and gain more control over their dream experiences. Beyond that, dreams could be transformed into art, music, or even fully interactive virtual worlds, allowing users to bring the creativity of their subconscious into the waking world.
A more futuristic idea is shared dream experiences, where users could enter one another’s dreams in a safe, immersive AR environment. Imagine stepping into a friend’s dream universe, interacting with dream characters, exploring surreal landscapes, or collaborating on creating new dreamscapes together. This would open up entirely new ways of social connection, creativity, and understanding human imagination.
Built With
- chatgpt
- figjam
- figma
- figmamake
- premierepro
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