electric shocks could very well work to signal lucid dreaming, the problem is the voltage that you feel an electric shock is quite high (for instance if you touch the ends of a 9V battery you won’t feel anything much, so you need more than 9v on the skin)… This means the device wouldn’t be powered by batteries anymore, so instead of reducing the size it actually adds to it… You’d probably have to plug it in the wall with an adapter and I wouldn’t trust anything home made that uses wall power, i’d be really scared of getting shocked and killed.
vibrations though are just a small motor that you offcenter… when it spins, it vibrates. You only need to attach it to the batteries and that’s about it. Leds as well, you just shove in a resistor, attach them to the battery and that’s it. so it doesn’t take that much space to begin with.
and do you mean the new goggles we’re working on how do they work or the ones i posted at the beginning of the thread?
the ones at the beginning of the thread just flash lights constantly at different hz for a light machine, or, if you use my qbasic program, when you tell it to. there’s nothing big there, though i read in some parts you should attach resistors to each of the LEDs to reduce strain of the LPT port… i’m using them with a computer i picked from a trash can, so i don’t care much about that and it seems the “strain” is not much, but a bit more research would be good.
the other ones i mentioned, the GSR ones have REM detection and will (hopefully) work in the following way:
there will be a small box attached to your printer port containing the device. coming out of it will be a wire, splitting in two at the goggled. One will stay there and power the 6 LEDS for a light machine/rem signaling… the other will go to your shoulder or maybe even lower to your finger (along the arm so you won’t be bugged by it) and have a small probe (two wires stuck to your finger basically).
These two wires will measure conductivity in your skin, which drops during rem. When the drop is noticed, the computer signals the goggles and voila, REM detection. it will be a bit more complicated than that, in that the computer software will probably have a light machine with biofeedback (GSR) incorporated, so the software part can expand a lot.