Wearable Biosensing and the Design, Documentation and Adaptation of Entertainment Experiences

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From games, to museums, to theme parks, to television, the creativeindustries are increasingly focused on the need for personalisation. Peopleare no longer willing to be passive consumers of experiences, but ratherexpect to be able to interact, explore, participate, shape, share anddiscuss them, and also to tailor and personalise them to suit theirindividual preferences. But how do we learn about people's preferences? This proposal aims toexplore the feasibility of using wearable biosensing technologies to capturedetailed physiological responses from participants such as heart rate andgalvanic skin response (GSR) which, along with movement data and video andaudio recordings, might be used to personalise different aspects of anexperience from its design, to its operation, to the way in which it isdocumented and shared with others. We will take the themepark as a driving domain for exploring the role ofbiosensing in designing, documenting and adapting entertainment experiences.Specifically, we will collaborate with Alton Towers, the UK's best knownthemepark, to conduct a series of three short feasibility studies in orderto frame issues and questions for further in depth research. The first willcapture a variety of biosensing data from different riders across differentrides and will conduct a preliminary analysis of this with a view ofinforming discussions of how such data might potentially help in theanalysis of existing rides and the design of future ones. The second willexplore how such data might be combined with captured video and audio aspart of the automated documentation and remote sharing of experiences. Thethird will consider the potential of biosensing to create new rides thatdirectly adapt themselves to a rider's personal response, includingexploring the feasibility of future robotic rides to adapt in real-time,i.e. during the ride experience. This feasibility study will build on preliminary work that has established abaseline of robust wearable biosensing technology and a successful workingrelationship with Alton Towers. Thus this proposal is not about thetechnical feasibility of constructing wearable biosensing technologies or ofbeing able to experiment with these in a theme park - these have alreadybeen proven. Rather, it is about the feasibility of using the resultingbiosensing data to enhance entertainment experiences in different ways,initially in theme parks, but ultimately across the creative industries andthe wider Digital Economy. The proposal also involves collaboration with RoboCoaster, a world-leadingleading company in the research, development, and production of automatedrides and entertainment experiences based on industrial robots andconveyance systems.