Making user engagement visible: a multimodal strategy for interactive media experience research

This paper describes an industry-academic collaborative research initiative, focused on determining useful measures of user engagement and experience with social media (e.g., video games, virtual worlds, social networking sites, etc.) and digital devices. Using newly designed hardware and software, the research initiative addresses the relationships among neurological, physiological, behavioral, and cognitive assessments of engagement in ongoing and short duration user experiences. It is a centerpiece of an iterative strategy toward understanding and modeling relationships among different engagement measures. The research will lead to design proposals for model-based assessments of engagement calibrated to individuals' responses.