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iPhone owners can now create impressionistic paintings of their sleep thanks to a new app from Ibis Hotels.

Calling upon the iPhone’s motion sensor and microphone, The Sleep Art app translates a person’s sleeping movements and sounds into a unique digitized work of art.

Before falling asleep a user launches the app and places his/her iPhone on their mattress. The app renders the picture in real time, so in a not-at-all creepy way, a friend can watch the phone and see every virtual brush stroke glide across virtual canvas.

The free app is available to all from iTunes and was developed in the wake of Ibis Hotels’ Sleep Art initiative, which ran in 2012.

Competition winners were invited to stay in specially designed Sleep Art beds at Ibis’ Paris, Berlin, London and Warsaw hotels.

Each bed had 80 sensors tracking its occupant’s movements, sounds and temperature. The resulting data was transmitted via the internet overnight to a robot housed in a Paris studio, which in turn used a real brush and brightly coloured paint to create abstract paintings on black canvas.


Written by insider city guide series Hg2 | A Hedonist’s guide to…

About the author

Brett AckroydBrett hopes to one day reach the shores of far-flung Tristan da Cunha, the most remote of all the inhabited archipelagos on Earth…as to what he’ll do when he gets there, he hasn’t a clue. Over the last 10 years, London, New York, Cape Town and Pondicherry have all proudly been referred to as home. Now it’s Copenhagen’s turn, where he lends his travel expertise to momondo.com.

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