Capturing Audience Experience via Mobile Biometrics

Different from computer vision based approaches in audience participation research, such as in Glimmer [1] and in Flock [2], this paper presents a mobile approach to collecting and visualizing bodily responses from audience members. A mobile biometric application is designed as a novel medium that interfaces audience members to experienced content. To realize our goal on a mobile platform, a combination of video-imaging-based heart rate measurement and Zeroconf networking technology [3] (Bonjour) is implemented. As a proof of concept, we successfully collect continuous heart rate values from 3 mobile phones devices simultaneously and use the derived heart rate statistics to drive artistic audio and visual rendering. Preliminary results include two iOS applications and two mobile-biometric-enabled media arts installations.