Visualizing the Emotional Journey of a Museum

Abstract

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.

The Cognitive-Emotional Design and Study of Architectural Space: A Scoping Review of Neuroarchitecture and Its Precursor Approaches

“…In addition to these aspects (orientation, etc. ), studies that identify the mechanisms of exposure to restorative environments should be highlighted [ 513 ], as should studies into the quantification, based on neurophysiological measures, of the effects of restorative environments in interior [ 514 ] and exterior spaces [ 515 , 516 ], the capture of the emotional impact of museum experiences [ 517 , 518 , 519 , 520 ], the modification of recommended house design variables [ 521 ], and works with mixed design aspects [ 522 ]. The results of some studies appear in Table 8 .…”

Evaluating emotional engagement in digital stories for interpreting the past. The case of the Hunterian Museum’s Antonine Wall EMOTIVE experiences

“…facial and vocal expression) and physiological indicators can be used to infer the emotional state of a person, there are no objective methods of measuring the subjective experience of a person during an emotion episode" [24]. This type of research has only recently started to take place in the museum environment and when it does, it tends to focus on specific artworks [25] and gallery architecture and mapping of visitors behaviour [26]. As devices recording physiometric measurements become more affordable, widespread, and less invasive, there is increasing potential in using physiometric measurements in future museum research (with some relevant papers in this volume).…”

Emotion visualization system based on physiological signals combined with the picture and scene

“…Another example is the analysis system of interactive emotion visualization based on TWITTER timeline, which can extract the change curve of user's mood. 2 Emotion visualization is also common in the field of art and design, for example, audience can experience visual conceptual design in museums, 3 and the emotional state of the audience watching the works can be recorded through wearable devices, and then the emotional experience of different works of art is expressed using different colors. Based on the data of emotion computing data, the emotion visualization system can go deeper into people's spiritual level.…”