Emotional Engagement Drives Onscreen Narratives: Gawain Morrison ‪CEO Sensum

IBC Executive 

Unsound was the world's first bio-responsive horror film, a 2011 short in which scenes, music and sound effects could be altered based on the biometric readings of the audience.

p45 http://issuu.com/newbayeurope/docs/ibc2015_executive_summary/44 via @Issuu

“We thought we'd cracked a new form of entertainment,” says co-producer Gawain Morrison. “We pitched all sorts of ideas at Hollywood studios and the TV industry. No-one was interested.”

Now the time is right. “A lot has changed since then and companies are much more open to it,” he says. “There's an explosion in business and consumer consciousness about emotions ranging from mainstream content (Pixar's Inside Out to Channel 4's Humans about robot AI) to behavioural economics and emotional response techniques for audience measurement.”

In 2013 Belfast-based Morrison co-founded Sensum to develop and market a software platform which consolidates and provides context to emotional data triggered by content on any screen gathered from a variety of off-the-shelf biosensors including EEG headsets, smart watches, health and fitness trackers, eye-scanning heat maps and heart rate monitors – anything that triggers emotion.

Sensum has secured $1m in funding to develop the sweet spot for understanding emotional response data.

“There's been a whole shift in mobile and digital which has been about extending the life of a piece of content across multiple platforms,” he says. “Success means a deeper engagement with audiences. The next layer is to look at biometrics and emotions and to generate new revenues and new creative opportunities.”

You can't help but be engaged by someone who lists on their LinkedIn profile a period of 'Lounging and Loitering' for three years in South East Asia.

These opportunities include “new kinds of entertainment beyond just staring at a screen,” he says.

“Storytelling is all about emotional relationships. We have to give people a reason to live in the worlds of virtual reality or photorealistic computer games. You can understand that better by using biometric feedback and sentiment analysis. You can try out multiple cuts, with different timing, audio, and scene selection, to determine what is most engaging for your target audiences.”

How near are we to the vision of Unbound in which individual emotional responses are fed back into the story or game in realtime to alter scenes on the fly?

“It's a question of budget,” says Morrison. “Creating multiple story trees in live action drama, especially at 4K, is too cost-prohibitive at this stage. With gaming and animation though, you have all the assets of a 3D world and realtime engines which could drive realtime shifts in narrative and interaction.”

Traditional media companies, he thinks, have been “terrified” of change and of the power that the science of emotion can have in engaging people.

Nonetheless, Sky, the BBC and Virgin Media are among broadcasters tapping technologies like Sensum for fresh insights into consumer responses to programming and advertising.

Morrison is the first to admit that eye-tracking sensors and skin temperature or pulse monitors are invasive of privacy unless pitched as aiding personalisation.

“If you can show people that you can weed out the nonsense in their programmes of an evening they understand it and are open to it. This technology is a slow burning fuse but it is being embraced.”