In 2024, Instrumented Auditorium, a cinema capable of measuring audience emotional reactions, will open in Bristol, UK.
Designed by the University of Bristol’s research centre MyWorld, in partnership with the BBC, Watershed cinema, Aardman and Netflix, the auditorium will be a 150-square-metre room with a capacity of 36 people in which, using special data monitoring equipment, viewers’ reactions to projected content will be measured and registered.
In particular, the audience’s biometric responses such as heart rate, eye movement and brain activity will be observed and recorded. Datas from the mesure of electrical properties of the skin will also be used to translate the conscious and unconscious emotional responses of individuals in the audience.
Iain Gilchrist, Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Bristol says: “The Instrumented Auditorium is the first fully equipped facility of its kind in the world, which is exciting not only for us as researchers but also for those working in the creative sector”.
Among the goals of the project, ther’s the aim to collaborate with film and distribution companies, as Gilchrist states, adding: “we already have a number of project partners including BBC, BT, Aardman, Netflix and Google and we are keen to expand our network as the facility becomes operational”.
The Instrumented Auditorium will be able to inform through audience reactions about what might be a final version of the product, providing unique insights far more effective than current questionnaire-based methods.
Photo credits: Belinda Hankins Miller, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
