#rC3 - Boiling Mind

rC3 postroll music

Herald: Now, imagine a stage with an
artist performing in front of a crowd.

Is there a way to measure and even quantify
the shows impact on the spectators?

Kai Kunze is going to address this
question in his talk Boiling Minds now.

Kai, up to you.

Kai: Thanks a lot for the introduction,
but we have a short video. I hope

that can be played right now.

intense electronic staccato music

music shifts to include softer piano tones

music shifts again to include harp-like tones

music keeps gently shifting

longer drawn out, slowly decreasing pitch

shift towards slow, guitar-like sounds

with light crackling noises

music getting quieter, softer

and fades away

inaudible talking

Kai: So thanks a lot for the intro and
this is the Boiling Mind talks or linking

physiology and choreography. I just started
off with this short video, that could

give you an overview over the experience
of this dance performance that we

staged in Tokyo beginning of the year,
just before the lockdown, actually.

And the idea behind this was: we wanted to
put the audience on a stage. So breaking the

fourth wall. Trying to use physiological
sensing in the audience. And that change

then is reflected on stage over the
projection, sound and also audio to

influence the dancers and performers and
then, of course, feed them back again to

the audience. So creating an augmented
feedback loop. In his talk today, I just

want to give you a small overview, a
little bit about the motivation, why I

thought it's a nice topic for the remote
experience from the Chaos Computer Club

and also a little bit more about the
concept, the set up and the design

iterations, as well as the lessons
learned. So for me to give this talk,

I thought it's a good way to exchange
expertise and get a couple of people that

might be interested for the next
iterations, because I think we are still

not done with this work. So it's still
kind of work in progress. And also a way

to share data. So to do some explorative
data analysis on the recorded performances

that we have. And then most important: I
wanted to create a more creative way to

use physiological data and explore it,
because also for me as a researcher

working on variable computing or activity
recognition, often we just look into

recognizing or predicting certain motions
or certain mental states.

And that kind of, at least for simple things,
feeds back into this very - I think -

idiotic or stupid ideas of surveillance and
applications cases and that.

So can we create more intuitive ways
to use physiological data?

So from a concept perspective, I think the

video gave a good overview of what we
tried to create. However,

what we did in 3 performances was: We used
physiological sensors on all audience

members. So for us, it was important that
we are not singling out individual people

to just get feedback from them, but have
the whole response, the whole physiological

state of the audience as an input to the
performance. In that case, we actually

used heart rate variability and also
galvanic skin response as inputs.

And these inputs then changed the projection
that you could see. The lights, especially

the intensity of the lights and also
the sound. And that, again, then led to

changes in the dancing behavior of the
performers.

For the sensing, we went with a variable
set up,

so in this case a fully wireless wristband,
because we wanted to do something that is

easy to wear and easy to put on and to put
off. We had a couple of iterations on that

and we decided then for electrodermal
activity and also heart activity

to sense, because there's some
related work that link these sensors to

engagement stress and also excitement
measures. And the question then was also

where to sense it first. We went with a
couple of wrist bands and also kind of

commercial approaches or half-commercial
approaches. However, the sensing quality

was just not good enough, especially from
the wrist. You cannot really get a good

electrodermal activity, so galvanic skin
response. It's more or less a sweat

sensor. So that means that you can detect
if somebody is sweating and some of the

sweat is actually then related to a stress
response. And in that case, there are a

couple of ways to measure that. So it
could be on the lower part of your hand or

also on the fingers. These are usually the
best positions. So we used the fingers.

Over the fingers we can also get heartrate
activity. And in addition to that, there's

also a small motion sensor, so a gyro and an
accelerometer in the wristband. We haven't

used that for the performance right now, but
we still have the recordings also from the

audience for that. When I say we, I mean
George especially and also Dingding,

2 researchers that work with me, did
actually took care of the designs.

So then the question was also how to
map it to the environment or the staging.

In this case, actually, this was done
by a different team,

this was done by the embodied media team
also at KMD.

So I know a little bit about it,
but I'm definitely not an expert.

And for the initial design we
thought we use the EDA for the movement

speed of the projection. So the EDA rate
of change is matched to movement of these

blobs that you could see or also the meshs
that you can see and the color represents

the heart rate. We went for the LFHF
feature that's low frequency, high

frequency ratio and should give you,
according to related work, some indication

about excitement. For the lights: the
lights were also bound to the heart rate,

in this case, the beats per minute, and
they were matched to intensity. So if the

beats per minute of the audience go
collectively up, the light gets brighter,

otherwise, it's dimmer. For the audio: we
had an audio designer that cared about

sounds and faded in and faded out specific
sounds also related to the EDA to the

relative rate of change of the electro-
dermal activity. All this happened while

the sensors were connected over sensing
server in QT to touch designer software

that generated this type of projections.
And also the music got fed into and that

was then controlling the feedback
to the dancers. If you want to

have a bit more of detail, I uploaded the
work in progress preprint paper, a draft

of an accepted TI paper. So in case you are
interested in the mappings and the design

decisions for the projections, there is
a little bit more information there.

I'm also happy later on to answer those
questions. However, I will probably just

forward them to the designers, that worked
on them. And then, for the overall

performance, what happened was, we started
out with an explanation of the experience.

So it was already advertised as a performance
that would take in electrodermal

activity and heartbeat activity.
So, people that bought tickets or came to

the event already had a little bit of
background information. We, of course,

made also sure that we explained at the
beginning what type of sensing we will be

using. Also what the risks and problems
with these type of sensors and data

collection is and then audience could decide,
with informed consent, if they just want to

stream the data, don't want to do
anything, or they want to stream and also

contribute the data anonymously to our
research. And then when the performance

started, we had a couple of pieces and
parts, that is something that you can see in

B, where we showed the live data feed from
all of the audiences in individual tiles. We

had that in before just for debugging, but
actually the audience liked that. And so

we made it a part of the performance, also
deciding with the choreographers to

include that. And then for the rest, as
you see in C, we have the individual

objects, these blob objects that move
according to the EDA data and change colour

based on the heart rate information. So
the low to high frequency. In B, you see

also these clouds. And yet similarly, the
size is related to the heart rate data.

And the movement again is EDA. And there's
also one scene in E where the dancers pick

one person in the audience and ask them to
come on stage. And then we will display

that audience members data at large in the
back of the projection. And for the rest,

again, we're using this excitement data
from the heart rate and from the

electrodermal activity to change sizes and
colours. So, to come up with this design, we

went the co-design route, discussing with
the researchers, dancers, visual

designers, audio designers a couple of
times. And actually that's also how I got

involved first, because the initial idea is
also from Moe, the primary designer of this

piece, were to combine somehow perception
and motion. And I worked a bit in research

with the eye tracking. So you see on the
screen the pupil website eye tracker it is

and open source eye tracking solution and
also EOG electro-oculography glasses, that

use the capacitance of your eyeballs to
detect something. Rough about eye emotion.

And we thought at the beginning, we want
to combine this, a person seeing the play

with the motions of the dancers and
understand that better. So that's kind of

how it started. The second inspiration for
this idea in the theatre came from a

visiting scholar, Jamie. Jamie Ward came
over and his work with the flood theater

in London. That's an inclusive theatre
that also does workshops or Shakespeare

workshops. And he did some sensing just
with the accelerometers and gyroscopes or

inertial motion wristbands to detect
interpersonal synchrony between

participants in these workshops. And then
we thought, when he came over, we had a

small piece where we looked into this
interpersonal synchrony again in face to

face communications. I mean, now we are
remote and I'm just talking into a camera

and I cannot see anybody. But usually, if
you would have a face to face conversation,

doesn't happen too often anymore,
unfortunately. We would show some type of

synchronies or, you know, kind of eyeblink,
head nod and so on would synchronize with

the other person, if you're talking to
them. And we also showed, that in small

recordings also we showed that we
can recognize this in a variable sensing

setup. So again, using some glasses and we
thought, why don't we try to scale that

up? Why don't we try and see what happens
in a theatre performance or in another

dance performance and see if we can
recognize also some type of synchrony. And

with a couple of ideation sessions, a
couple of also test performances, also

including dancers trying out glasses,
trying out other headwear. And that was

not really possible to use for the dancers
during the performance. We came up with an

initial prototype and that we tried out,
so in, I think November 2018 or so, where

we used a couple of pupil-labs and also
pupil-invisible. These are nicer eye tracking

glasses, they are optical eye tracking
glasses, so they have small cameras in

them, distributed in the audience. A couple
of those Yoji glasses, they have also

initial motion sensors in them. So
accelerometer and gyroscope. And we had at

the time heart rate sensors. However, they
were fixed and wired to the system. And

also the dancers wore some wristbands
where we could record the motion data. And

then what we did in these cases, then we
had projections on three frames on top

of the dancers. One was showing the blink
and the headnod synchronization of the

audience. The other one showed heart rate
and variability. And the third one just

showed raw feed from one of the eye
trackers. And it looked more or less like

this. And from a technical perspective, we
were surprised because it actually worked.

So we could stream around 10 glasses,
three eye trackers and four, five, I think

heart rate sensors at the same time and the surfer
worked. However, from an audience

perspective, a lot of the feedback was the
audience didn't like that just some people

got singled out and got the device by
themselves and others could not really

contribute and could not also see the
data. And then also from a performance

perspective, the dancers didn't really
like that they couldn't interact with the

data. The dance piece also in this case
was pre-choreographed. So there was no

possibility for the dancers to really
interact with the data. And then also,

again, from an esthetic perspective, we
really didn't like that the screens were

on top because either you would
concentrate on the screens or you would

concentrate on the dance performance. And
you had to kind of make a decision also on

what type of visualization you would focus
on. So overall, you know, kind of partly

okay, but still there were some troubles.
So one was definitely we wanted to include

all of the audience. Meaning we wanted to
have everybody participate. Then the

problem with that part was then also
having enough eye trackers or having

enough head worn devices was an issue. In
addition to that, you know, kind of, if

it's head worn some people might not like
it. The pandemic hadn't started yet. When

we did the recordings, however, there was
already the information, some information

about the virus going around. So we didn't
really want as, putting everybody,

giving everybody some eyeglasses. So then
we moved to the heart rate and, galvanic

skin response solution and the set up
where the projection is now part of the

stage. So we used the two walls, but we
also used, it's a little bit hard to see

in the images, but we also used the floor
as another projection surface for the

dancers to interact with and the main
interaction, actually came then over the

sound. So then moving over to the lessons
learned. So what did we take away from

from that experience? And the first part
was talking with the dancers and talking

with the audience often, if you saw,
especially the more intricate, the more

abstract visualizations, it was sometimes
hard to interpret also how their own data

would feed into that visualization. So,
you know, kind of some audience members

mentioned to some point in time they were
not sure if they're influencing anything

or if it had an effect on other parts,
especially if they saw the live data. It

was kind of obvious. But for future work,
we really want to play more with the

agency and also perceived agency of the
audiences and the performers. And we also

really wonder how can we measure this type
of feedback loops? Because now we have

these recordings. We looked also a little
bit more into the data, but it's hard to

understand. Were we successful? I think in
some extent maybe yes, because the

experience was fun. It was enjoyable. But
on this level of, did we really create

feedback loops and how do you evaluate
feedback loops, that's something that we

want to address in future work. On the
other hand, what was surprising I

mentioned before the raw data was
something that the dancers as well as the

audience really liked. And that was
surprising for me because I thought we had

to hide that more or less. But we had it
on. As I said, there's kind of a debug at

the beginning of some test screenings and
audience members were interested in it and

could see and were talking about: "Oh, see
your heart rate is going up or your EDA is

going up." And the dancers also like that.
And we used that then in the performance

in the three performances that we then
successfully made for especially scenes

where the dancers would interact directly
with parts of the audience. At the

beginning of the play is a scene where the
dancers give out business cards to some

audience members. And it was fun to see
that some audience members could identify

themselves, other audience members would
identify somebody else that was sitting

next to them. And then this member had a
spike in EDA because of the surprise. So

there was really, you know, kind of some
interaction going on. So maybe staying if

you're planning to do a similar event,
staying close to the raw data and also low

latency. So I think it's quite important
for some types of these interactions. From

the dancers there was a big interest, on
the one side, they wanted to use the data

for reflection. So they really liked that
they had the printouts of the effects of

the audience later on. However, they also
wanted to dance more with biometric data

and also use that for their rehearsals
more. So, of course, you know, we had to

co-design, so we worked directly. We
showed the dancers the sensors and the

possibilities and then worked with them to
figure out what can work and what cannot

work and what might have an effect, what
might not have an effect. And then we did

some, as you saw, also some prototype
screenings and also some internal

rehearsals where we used some recorded
data. We used some, a couple of people of

us were sitting in the audience. We got a
couple of other researchers and also

students involved to sit in the audience
to stream data. And we also worked a

little bit with prerecorded experiences
and also synthetic experiences, how we

envisioned that the data would move. But
still, it was not enough in terms of

providing an intuitive way to understand
what is going on, especially also for the

visualizations and the projections. They
were harder to interpret than the sound in

the sound sphere. So and then the next and
the biggest point, maybe as well is, the

sensors and the feature best practices. So
we're still wondering, you know, what to

use. We're still searching. What kind of,
sensing equipment can we use to relay

this, in this invisible link between
audience and performers? How can we

augment that? We started out with the
perception and eye tracking part, we then

went to wrist one device because it's
easier to maintain and it's also wireless.

And it worked quite well to stream 50 to
60 audience members for one of those

events to a wireless router and do the
recording, as well as the life

visualization with it. However, the
features might have not been.

Audio Failure

Okay. Sorry for the short part where it was
offline. So, we were talking about a sense

of features and best practices. So in this
case, we are still searching for the right

type of sensors and features to use for
this type of audience, performer

interaction. And we were using, the, yeah,
the low frequency, high frequency ratio of

the heart rate values and also the
relative changes of the EDA. And that was

working, I would say not that well,
compared to other features that we now

found while looking into the performances
and the recorded data of the around, 98

participants that agreed to share the data
with us, for these performances. And from

the preliminary analysis that Karen Han,
one of our researchers working on and

looking into what type of features are
indicative of changes in the performance.

It seems that a feature called PNN that's
related to heart rate variability to the

R-R intervals is, seems to be quite good. And
also the peak detection per minute using

the EDA data. So we're just counting the
relative changes, the relative up and

down, for the EDA. If you're interested
I'm happy to share the data with you. So

we have three performances each
around an hour and 98 participants in

total. And we have the heart rate data,
the EDA data, from the two fingers as well

as, the motion data as well. We haven't
used the motion data at all except for

filtering out a little bit the EDA and
heart rate data because if you're moving a

lot, you will have some errors and some
problems, some motion artifacts in it. But

what do I mean with why is the PNN or why
is the EDA peak detection so nice? Let's

look a little bit closer into the data.
And here you see I just highlighted

performance three from the previous plots.
You see PNN50 on the left side is the scale, the

blue line gives you the average of the
PNN50 value. So this is the R-R interval

related heart rate variability feature and
that feature is especially related to

relaxation and also to stress. So usually
a lower PNN50 value means you're more

relaxed and a higher value means that
you're. No, higher value means that you're

more relaxed, sorry. Lower value means
that you are more stressed out. So what happens

now in the performance is something that
fits very, very well and correlates with

the intention of the choreographer.
Because the first half of the performance,

you see section one, two, three, four,
five and six on the bottom. The first half

of the performance is to create a conflict
in the audience and to stir them up a

little. So, for example, also the business
card scene is part of that part, or also

the scene where somebody gets brought from
the audience to the stage and joins the

performance is also part of that versus
the latter part is more about reflection

and also relaxation. So taking in what you
experienced at the first part, and that's

something that you see actually quite nice
in the PNN50. So at the beginning it's

rather low. That means the audience is
slightly tense versus in the latter part

they more relaxed. Similarly, the EDA in
the bottom as a bar chart gives you an

indication of a lot of peaks happening at
specific points. And these points

correlate very well to memorable scenes in
the performance. So seeing the one scene,

where, actually section four, the red one,
is the one where somebody from the

audience gets brought onto the stage.
Where is this? I think around minute

twelve there is a scene where the dancers
handout business cards. And that's

also something, I think. So it's
promising, we're not there yet definitely

from the data analysis part, but there are
some interesting things to see. And that

kind of brings me back to the starting
point. So I think, it was an amazing

experience actually, working with a lot of
talented people on that and the

performance was a lot of fun, but we are
slowly moving towards putting the audience

on stage and trying to break the fourth
wall, I think, with these type of setups.

And that leads me then also to the end of
the talk where I just have to do a shout

out for the people who did the actual
work. So all of the talented performers

and the project lead, especially Moe who
organized and was also the link between

the artistic side and the dancers with
Mademoiselle Cinema and us, as well as the

choreographer Ito-san. And yeah, I hope I
didn't miss anybody. So that's it. So

thanks a lot for this opportunity to
introduce this work to you. And now I'm

open for a couple of questions, remarks. I
wanted to also host a self organized

session sometime. I haven't really gotten
the link or anything, but I'll probably

just post something on Twitter or in one
of the chats if you want to stay in

contact. I'll try to get two or three
researchers also to join. I know George,

who was working on the hardware, and
Karen, who worked on the visualizations,

the data analysis might be available. And
if you interested in that, just send me an

email or check, maybe, I just also add it
to the blog post or so if I get the link

later. So, yeah. Thanks a
lot for the attention.

Herald: Thanks, Kai, for this nice talk.
For the audience, please excuse us for the

small disruption of service we had here.
We're a little bit late already, but I

think we still have time for a question or
so. Unfortunately, I don't see anything

here online at the moment. So if
somebody tried to pose a question and

there was also disruption of service, I
apologize beforehand for that. On the

other hand now, Kai, you talked about data
sharing. So how can the data be accessed?

Do people need to access you or drop to
you a mail or personal message?

Kai: Yeah, we're on the,
so right now, no publication is

still accepted and there's also some
issues actually, a little bit of some

rights issues or so on. So the
easiest part is just to send me a mail.

It will be posted sometime next year
on a more public website. But the easiest

is just to post me a mail. There're already
a couple of people working on it and we

have the rights to share it. It's just a little
bit of a question of setting it up.

I wanted to have the website also online
before the talk, but yeah, as with the

technical difficulties and so on, everything
is a little bit harder this year.

Herald: Indeed. Indeed. Thanks,
guys. Yes, I'd say that's it for this

session. Thank you very much again for
your presentation. And I'll switch back to

the others.

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