Exploring Audience Response in Performing Arts with a Brain-Adaptive Digital Performance System

Audience response is an important indicator of the quality of performing arts. Psychophysiological measurements enable researchers to perceive and understand audience response by collecting their bio-signals during a live performance. However, how the audience respond and how the performance is affected by these responses are the key elements but are hard to implement. To address this issue, we designed a brain-computer interactive system called Brain-Adaptive Digital Performance (BADP) for the measurement and analysis of audience engagement level through an interactive three-dimensional virtual theater. The BADP system monitors audience engagement in real time using electroencephalography (EEG) measurement and tries to improve it by applying content-related performing cues when the engagement level decreased. In this article, we generate EEG-based engagement level and build thresholds to determine the decrease and re-engage moments. In the experiment, we simulated two types of theatre performance to provide participants a high-fidelity virtual environment using the BADP system. We also create content-related performing cues for each performance under three different conditions. The results of these evaluations show that our algorithm could accurately detect the engagement status and the performing cues have a positive impact on regaining audience engagement across different performance types. Our findings open new perspectives in audience-based theatre performance design.