Dormouse

A shared pixel-art room you fall asleep in.

Up to twelve people sit or lie down in the same small room. A TV plays public-domain films from a shared queue. Rain falls outside the window. Nobody has to say anything, and after ten minutes of stillness your avatar quietly falls asleep.

It is for people who sleep better when there are others nearby.

Status: planning complete, implementation not started. See docs/design.md for the plan of record and docs/backlog.md for what is scheduled after v0.1.

Why

The behaviour already exists: people sleep together in VRChat worlds nightly, one of which has over 13 million visits. But a headset is the worst possible object to wear while falling asleep. Meanwhile the cosy-room products that run in a browser are all framed around focus and productivity — Pomodoro timers and task lists — which is the opposite of winding down.

Nobody has shipped the sleep framing in a form you can leave running on a phone at your bedside. That is the whole idea.

Design principles

Stillness is the aesthetic. The room is designed to be beautiful when nobody is doing anything. Within twenty minutes of filling up, everyone in a room is unconscious — designing for conversation would produce an empty room.

Audio is the product; the room is the on-ramp. The visuals get about ten minutes of attention. After that the renderer throttles, the screen dims, and the audio keeps going.

Capability, not presence, is gated. Anyone can come in and lie down, including without an account. Chatting, queueing media and changing the weather unlock with account tenure.

Stack

PixiJS v8 (WebGL2, GLSL) · Svelte 5 · Capacitor for Android · a single WebSocket server with room state in memory · Postgres · media on Cloudflare R2.

Web is the primary platform. Android follows. There is no iOS client.

Getting started

bun install
cp .env.example .env
bun run dev          # starts Postgres in Docker, then the client and server

Useful scripts:

Command	What it does
bun run dev	Compose infra, then client + server on the host
bun run check	lint, typecheck, test, build
bun run ports	show this worktree's deterministic port assignment

Parallel worktrees get non-colliding ports automatically, hashed from the worktree path. See docs/development.md.

Making art is a separate pipeline with its own runbook (it needs an NVIDIA GPU): tools/art/README.md.

Licence

Open core. The client is GPL-3.0, the server is AGPL-3.0, and the commercial surface is art and audio packs rather than the program. See COPYRIGHT.md.

Built on the 508 devkit. The adaptation is recorded in docs/selection-report.md.