The sentiment of a virtual rock concert

Abstract

We created a virtual reality version of a 1983 performance by Dire Straits, this being a highly complex scenario consisting of both the virtual band performance and the appearance and behaviour of the virtual audience surrounding the participants. Our goal was to understand the responses of participants, and to learn how this type of scenario might be improved for later reconstructions of other concerts. To understand the responses of participants we carried out two studies which used sentiment analysis of texts written by the participants. Study 1 (n = 25) (Beacco et al. in IEEE Virtual Reality: 538–545, 2021) had the unexpected finding that negative sentiment was caused by the virtual audience, where e.g. some participants were fearful of being harassed by audience members. In Study 2 (n = 26) notwithstanding some changes, the audience again led to negative sentiment—e.g. a feeling of being stared at. For Study 2 we compared sentiment with questionnaire scores, finding that the illusion of being at the concert was associated with positive sentiment for males but negative for females. Overall, we found sentiment was dominated by responses to the audience rather than the band. Participants had been placed in an unusual situation, being alone at a concert, surrounded by strangers, who seemed to pose a social threat for some of them. We relate our findings to the concept of Plausibility, the illusion that events and situations in the VR are really happening. The results indicate high Plausibility, since the negative sentiment, for example in response to being started at, only makes sense if the events are experienced as actually happening. We conclude with the need for co-design of VR scenarios, and the use of sentiment analysis in this process, rather than sole reliance on concepts proposed by researchers, typically expressed through questionnaires, which may not reflect the experiences of participants.

Avoiding virtual humans in a constrained environment: Exploration of novel behavioural measures

“…We did not implement the whole questionnaire since we only used it as a control question which was not a part of our statistical analysis. We anticipated that the behavioral response itself will be a strong predictor of presence, or rather place and plausibility illusions as discussed in Slater et al [45]. Similarly, we selected only the relevant questions of agency and body ownership from the Embodiment Questionnaire [46] as embodiment was not the focus of our study.…”

Concert experiences in virtual reality environments

“…The current study has its limitations. Firstly, as research focusing on immersive virtual concert experiences is still in its infancy (Onderdijk et al 2021;Slater et al 2022), rather than using more in-depth qualitative and/or quantitative methods, we opted to take a broad, exploratory view using a mixed-method approach. Our methods provided a variety of novel findings on such experiences, which can be further elaborated on in more in-depth future work.…”

Haptic feedback in a virtual crowd scenario improves the emotional response

“…Virtual reality (VR) has been an invaluable tool in the study of human behavior and emotional arousal in crowds (Somarathna et al, 2022), offering precise control and the replication of parameters of the virtual crowds across multiple participants with a detailed assessment of individual data. For example, a study exploring people's responses to being part of a virtual rock concert audience found that negative sentiments sometimes resulted from interactions with the virtual audience and that the illusion of being at the concert was associated with positive sentiment for men but negative sentiments for women (Beacco et al, 2021;Slater et al, 2022). Dickinson et al (2019) found a significant increase in negative effects as the density of a virtual crowd increased.…”