The Sentiment of a Virtual Rock Concert

Abstract

We created a virtual reality version of a 1983 performance by Dire Straits. 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., 2021, Disturbance and Plausibility in a Virtual Rock Concert, IEEE Virtual Reality) had the unexpected finding that negative sentiment was caused by the virtual audience, where e.g., some were fearful of being harassed by them. 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. We relate our findings to the concept of Plausibility, the illusion that events and situations in the VR are real. 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 which may not reflect the experiences of participants.

A comparison of two methods for moving through a virtual environment: walking in place and interactive redirected walking

“…Along with the statistical results from the Likert scale questions, we were also interested in a deeper understanding using sentiment analysis of the texts in the open-ended questions. In previous research (Slater et al, 2022b), this approach resulted in unexpected findings that would never have been found from the standard questionnaire responses alone. Sentiment analysis (Liu, 2012;Bakshi et al, 2016) is based on a multitude of classifications of words in dictionaries that have been assigned positive or negative valence through the use of natural language processing, text analysis, and computational linguistics.…”

“…We adopted the same strategy as Slater et al (2022b). Four different sentiment analysis methods were used that were available through the R statistical computing language.…”

Musical Metaverse: vision, opportunities, and challenges

“…The use of XR technologies in musical activities represents a paradigm shift as they disrupt traditional notions of musical interaction by enabling performers and audiences to interact musically with virtual/augmented objects, agents, and environments. A large variety of musical activities have been investigated using the XR medium: systems have been devised for supporting composition (e.g., [22][23][24]), education (e.g., [25,26]), performance (e.g., [27][28][29]), entertainment (e.g., [30][31][32]), and sound engineering (e.g., [33][34][35][36]. Moreover, various software and hardware tools have been devised to support the development of Musical XR systems (e.g., [37][38][39]39]), along with design and analysis frameworks [41], while different studies have investigated the perception in Musical XR settings (e.g., [42,43]).…”