Visualizing the Emotional Journey of a Museum

Wearable devices and new types of sensors make it possible to capture people behavior, activity and, potentially, cognitive state in their daily life. Today those devices are mainly used for well-being applications, by recording and displaying people's activity. Some work have been published going a step further by inferring from the recorded signals the emotional state of individuals or group of people. However, the information provided and the way it is presented are still in their infancy, with time lined graphs showing calories, heart-rate, steps, temperature, and sometimes affective intensity. In this paper we present an experiment done during the visit of different people in a museum of arts to capture the emotional impact of the exposed paintings. We also propose an associated visualization of their emotional journey. The emotion is here measured as the affective response to the paintings observation, and the processing algorithm is based on an existing technique adapted to the particular case of different observation durations. The visualization is based on a 3D map of the museum with different colors associated to the different paintings to get the emotional heat-map of the museum (more precisely the arousal dimension). The validation has been done in the museum of arts at Lyon, France, with 46 visitors, for a total of 27 paintings, exposed in three different rooms.