Behind the scenes: What happens when you wear a biosensor to the movies?
 |
| Graphics show individuals' reactions to films at the New Directors' Showcase at the Cannes Lions conference. |
CANNES, France -- Therapists the world over advise people to get in touch with their emotions. Now a London startup called Studio XO hopes to profit from the idea -- starting with a splashy demonstration of what happened when 2,300 people all shared their feelings at once.
The event here on Thursday came during ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi's annualNew Directors' Showcase at the Cannes Lions conference for the marketing and advertising industry. Since 1991, Saatchi & Saatchi has shown an hour-long reel of new moviemakers' work, and this year it picked Studio XO, which combines bio-sensor technology with fashion, to add a new emotional dimension to the experience.
At the "Feel the Reel" event, the audience's emotional state became part of the show itself. Data gathered from bio-sensor wristbands was piped into computer animation technology that showed individual and collective emotional responses.
"We're breaking down the fourth wall," the barrier that ordinarily separates the audience from what's happening on stage, said Studio XO co-founder Nancy Tilbury.
As digital sensors and wearable computing spread beyond R&D labs into the mainstream computer industry, emotions could become a much more explicit part of our lives. Studio XO hopes emotion monitors will become as common as fitness monitors today. Dell is examining emotions for reshaping computer interfaces. Emotion data could help people keep an eye on elderly parents and help teachers understand when students are engaged or bored. And here at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the emotions are gold for advertising agencies that want to gauge ads' effectiveness and aim them only at a receptive population.
For the same reason advertisers like it, though, emotion tracking poses problems. Emotions are intensely personal, the kind of thing that people ordinarily can be most reluctant to share as they watch TV, browse the Web, go to work, and even talk to spouses. Automatically logged emotions could provide children and teenagers with a new type of worrisomely personal information to broadcast over social networks.
A 'visceral response'
Feel the Reel was out of the ordinary, though -- a group event where sharing was part of the point. Audience members' wristbands monitored their emotional state through proprietary sensor technology, showed that state with a color-changing LED, and beamed the information to a central server.
That data was fed into a computer-art display that showed the entire audience its reaction to each episode in the video. On the wristband LEDs, a spectrum running from blue through green, red, and then magenta signified greater levels of arousal.
"It's a good visceral response to see how people are reacting," said Tom Eslinger, Saatchi & Saatchi's worldwide digital creative director, who oversaw the selection of videos for the directors' reel.
Most of the time, most audience members' LEDs glowed just calm blue or a slightly more agitated green -- even during Tatia Pilieva's provocatively awkward video "First Kiss," which records complete strangers as they meet and kiss. But reactions were much more dramatic for "Grotesque Photobooth," a not-terribly-safe-for-work video by Donato Sansone featuring lots of flesh and a little genitalia.
"The whole show jumped," said Studio XO co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Ben Males, who was watching the collective reaction on a computer screen offstage. "It was quite amazing."
Before the show, people bantered nervously as they scrutinized their wristbands. "It's to tell you how hung over you are," quipped one audience member. "It's a bit nerve-racking. People can't lie about what they're seeing in the films," added another.
Indeed, there was a clinical theme to the event, as if the audience was undergoing a diagnostic procedure. The wristbands were distributed in the same kind of sterile packaging that would contain a syringe or gauze bandage, and spotlit women dressed as nurses showed how to use the devices shortly before Studio XO calibrated the gadgets with a sequence of startlingly flashing lights.
A clinical audience, too
Perhaps the calm reactions during the show itself reflected the unusual setting, suggested Felipe Barreto of Brazilian ad agency CasaDigital.
"The viewers here are very analytical," he said. "We're not here to get emotional."
But there's a difference between watching video and watching real life. People may not have been powerfully moved by "Ghost of a Smile" by Simon Bonde and Peder, but seeing its brutal bare-knuckle boxing in reality would doubtless send a lot more adrenaline flowing.
Perhaps the best test was Alberto Belli, who had one of those real-life moments at the showcase, when his risque video "It's not Porn" was featured. For most of the show, his wristband glowed either blue or green, but when his own clip showed, his nervousness pushed the device into the red zone.
Nevertheless, the wristbands were intriguing. Jose Luis Villar, also from CasaDigital, saw that his wristband showed only blue or green, but he wondered why the band worn by the girl next to him displayed a red status. "What is happening? She was more intense than me," Villar said.
