Immersion and togetherness: How live visualization of audience engagement can enhance music events

This paper evaluates the influence of an additional visual aesthetic layer on the experience of concert goers during a live event. The additional visual layer incorporates musical features as well as bio-sensing data collected during the concert, which is coordinated by our audience engagement monitoring technology. This technology was used during a real Jazz concert. The collected measurements were used in an experiment with 32 participants, where two different forms of visualization were compared: one factoring in music amplitude, audience engagement collected by the sensors and the dynamic atmosphere of the event, the other one purely relying on the beat of the music. The findings indicate that the visual layer could add value to the experience if used during a live concert, providing a higher level of immersion and feeling of togetherness among the audience

Crowdsourcing-based multimedia subjective evaluations: a case study on image recognizability and aesthetic appeal

International audienceResearch on Quality of Experience (QoE) heavily relies on subjective evaluations of media. An important aspect of QoE concerns modeling and quantifying the subjective notions of 'beauty' (aesthetic appeal) and 'something well-known' (content recognizability), which are both subject to cultural and social effects. Crowdsourcing, which allows employing people worldwide to perform short and simple tasks via online platforms, can be a great tool for performing subjective studies in a time and cost-effective way. On the other hand, the crowdsourcing environment does not allow for the degree of experimental control which is necessary to guarantee reliable subjective data. To validate the use of crowdsourcing for QoE assessments, in this paper, we evaluate aesthetic appeal and recognizability of images using the Microworkers crowdsourcing platform and compare the outcomes with more conventional evaluations conducted in a controlled lab environment. We find high correlation between crowdsourcing and lab scores for recognizability but not for aesthetic appeal, indicating that crowdsourcing can be used for QoE subjective assessments as long as the workers' tasks are designed with extreme care to avoid misinterpretations