Partners to Develop Cinema Audience Monitoring Tools

In the UK, experts from the University of the West of England (UWE) have partnered with cinema piracy technology firm Aralia Systems, to develop software to monitor audience reactions to films and adverts, and also gather data about attention and audience movement.

Aralia has been awarded a 'Knowledge Transfer Partnership' (KTP) with UWE's Machine Vision Lab (MVL), worth in excess of £215k, to build new capabilities into its piracy tracking technology. The project is also supported by a grant of £118k from the Technology Strategy Board and the EPSRC.

Vision Lab's Dr Abdul Farooq will lead the initiative, which builds on existing technology used in cinemas to detect criminals making pirate copies of films with video cameras.

'Obviously cinema audiences are spread out in large theatre settings so we need to build instruments that can capture data for different purposes,' explains Farooq. 'We will use 2D cameras to detect emotion but will also collect movement data through a 3D data measurement that will capture the audience as a whole as a texture.'

Within the cinema industry this tool will feed marketing data that will inform film directors, cinema advertisers and cinemas with information about what audiences enjoy and what adverts capture the most attention. Farooq says that by measuring emotion and movement, film companies and cinema ad agencies will glean information from their audiences that will help to inform creativity and strategy.

He adds that once the technology has been fine tuned, it could be used by market researchers in a number of settings, including monitoring reactions to shop window displays.

The partners are currently recruiting a graduate Computer Scientist who will work on the project for its three-year duration.

Web sites: www.uwe.ac.uk and www.araliasystems.com .