Enhancing Audience Engagement in Performing Arts Through an Adaptive Virtual Environment with a Brain-Computer Interface

Audience engagement is an important indicator of the quality of the performing arts but hard to measure. Psychophysiological measurements are promising research methods for perceiving and understanding audience's responses in real-time. Currently, such research are conducted by collecting biometric data from audience when they are watching a performance. In this paper, we draw on techniques from brain-computer interfaces (BCI) and knowledge from quality of performing arts to develop a system that monitor audience engagement in real time using electroencephalography (EEG) measurement and seek to improve it by triggering the adaptive performing cues when the engagement level decreased. We simulated the immersive theatre performances to provide audience a high-fidelity visual-audio experience. An experimental evaluation is conducted with 48 participants during two different performance studies. The results showed that our system could successfully detect the decreases in audience engagement and the performing cues had positive effects on regain audience engagement. Our research offers the guidelines for designing theatre performances from the audience's perception.