OH boy oh boy oh boy. Are we ever excited about this one. For about a year we have been hard at work creating an awesome experience for Pepcid Max alongside JWT and we are finally thrilled to announce the launch of Max My Dream !!!

‘Max My Dream’ visualizes the sweet dreams you have after a peaceful night’s sleep with Pecid Max. Wether you are dreaming about puppies in space or political discourse, ‘Max My Dream’ visualizes everything. Yeah, everything. We were thrilled with the challenge and really pushed the tech and visual design to achieve our goal. So get ready, we are gonna get really into it here, but it’s really freaking awesome.

The site is based on real world dream research. A crap ton of it. We curated themes, visuals, animations, and styles that covered the most common dreams and allowed us the flexibility to visualize everything. Where we landed was a matrix of, like, 1 billion animations, sub animations, modifiers, settings, illustrations, and keywords. We had great animators and developers creating the templates of sorts for all our actions. A group of awesome illustrators worked their asses off to create every asset. Wordsmiths broke down the entire english language including some hilarious pop culture references. We got really, REALLY, good at nailing down the different ways people verbalize simple ideas and actions like, “walking.” Strolling. Trotting. Stepping. Keeping Pace. Sorry, sorry, it’s just second nature now.

But this is more than just keyword mapping. That isn’t very interesting and it’s been done a billion times. We wanted to get the real meaning of your dreams. The actions, the main characters, the mood, and the passive bystanders. We needed to dig into the language and some hardcore language processing logic.

We built a natural language processor focused on parsing the grammar of short sentences, with an eye towards common internet slang. This was achieved using a mix of existing language processing toolkits, as well as our own language training mechanisms. Once a sentence is broken into components like nouns and verbs, the system looks at our custom database of things to find relevant illustrations and animations. This database contains as many items we we could think of (and illustrate), from Kim Kardashian to types of pets. The more material we have here the more accurately we can animate submitted dreams. This aggregation of media is then handed off to Flash for rendering to the visitor.

Processing the language of dreams and building out the animations are complex, computationally expensive processes. We needed a heavy duty server side environment to ensure reliable delivery. Dreams are submitted to a central database, and a pool of language processor servers work through the submission. This allows us to scale horizontally as demand requires. We can add new processor servers in minutes as needed. It’s some crazy tech we are super proud of. If anything, it reminded us how incredibly complicated and nuanced the every day language we use is. Extracting meaning from free text is no small feat, and we’re very pleased with our results.

Then it came down to opening it up to the user. Giving them the outlet and open-ended environment to visualize their dreams. Upon simply typing in whatever they want and clicking, “Max My Dream,” the curtain of the night sky parts and you are engulfed by your dream. Suddenly you are back to walking through a field of dinosaurs on your way to Grandma’s house. Abode. Shack. Home. Homestead. Living quarters. SORRY!

As with all dreams, the moment is fleeting. Almost as quickly as you entered, the dream melts away. Fear not, you can watch it again, Max another dream, or share your experience with your custom URL or our awesome dream embed.

The process was long, demanding, and presented a lot of problems that have never been tackled before. Though we had amazing support from JWT and Pepcid wasn’t afraid to do something this bold and interesting. It all fell together like a sweet ass puzzle. Riddle. Conundrum. Game. Okay okay, I gotta stop. You should just go try it out.

Sometimes the dream visualizations are spot on, even scarily so. Sometimes they are pretty close. And sometimes they are so ridiculous that we can’t help but keep replaying them. It’s a huge step in how people can break down language for something artistic, and we are excited to see where language processing goes next.

Sweet Dreams.
Max My Dream