Dolby Laboratories has been
around since 1965, and for most people, the company is synonymous to the white
label you see at the end of movies that tells you that the sound and video have
been remastered in some way. Inside its headquarters in San Francisco, Dolby
has over a hundred technical labs, and over the past five years some of the
labs have been devoted to a lesser-known project: watching people while they’re
watching movies. The company has been attaching biosensors to willing subjects
and plopping them down on a couch to settle in for an entertainment session.
Using EEG caps, heart rate monitors, galvanic skin response sensors, and
thermal imaging Flir cameras, the scientists can observe the biophysical and
emotional responses that humans are experiencing via media.
They’re trying to figure out what
kind of videos and sounds make people’s hearts race, what makes their skin
flush, and what makes them cognitively engaged, aroused, or maybe even bored. Dolby
is using this information to better sell its own technology to its Hollywood
content partners. The idea being that if it can prove that HDR, surround sound,
or a certain color palette, will elicit an emotional response, then the
creative content makers are more likely to want to use Dolby tools. This kind
of affective computing has been around for decades, but industry experts say
that in entertainment it’s becoming even more common. Case in point: both
Netflix and Hulu, have used eye-tracking technology in recent years to get a
sense of where people are looking within their app interfaces.
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