SNAPlab

During my travels to inspiring research sites, I visited Felix Carter at the University of Bristol. I met Felix last year at a conference and was intrigued by the fact that, as a psychologist, he is involved in research into the perception of art. Last week, when I visited Felix in Bristol, we finally had time to talk about our research. It seems to me that Felix and I have very similar research interests. He places a little more emphasis on the synchronicity of the viewing experience, while I focus more on the impact of formal means in shaping the viewing experience, but in the end we are talking about the same thing. The difference is that Felix, unlike me, understands statistics.

I took two main things away from our meeting. First, it was an amazing experience when Felix showed me what they have at MyWorld cinema. MyWorld is a research center similar in focus to Co-STAR at Royal Holloway. They also specialize in technology and its use in creative industries. And people like Felix will soon have a cinema at MyWorld for researching audience reactions (not only) to films. The cinema seats 35 people and is equipped with a projector, sound equipment, and recording technology. It has several cameras to record audience faces, as well as ports for connecting sets for recording brain and heart activity. Felix said they are considering how to connect eye trackers to individual seats. Once this is done, hopefully in the second half of this year, we will be a little closer to finding out how viewers really perceive audiovisual works. We will move from laboratories to real movie theaters.

The second thing I’m taking away from Bristol is a few ideas for joint research. First, Felix and I decided to look at my older data and see if the video format (vertical/horizontal) affects the way we scan actors’ faces. According to my data, it seems that there is a difference in how we watch horizontal and vertical videos. It stands to reason that there will also be a difference in how we observe human faces in each format. And hopefully in the second half of the year we will be able to collect some new data in Felix’s cinema.