Abdul Farooq, head of the University’s Machine Vision Lab, said the partners plan to leverage existing cinema technology that is used to catch people recording films during screenings “to devise instruments… to monitor audience reactions to films and adverts and also to gather data about attention and audience movement”.

2D imaging technology would detect viewer emotion while 3D cameras would collect movement data, said Farooq.

“Within the cinema industry this tool will feed powerful marketing data that will inform film directors, cinema advertisers and cinemas with useful data about what audiences enjoy and what adverts capture the most attention,” he said.

“By measuring emotion and movement film companies and cinema advertising agencies can learn so much from their audiences that will help to inform creativity and strategy.”

Development of the research system is expected to take three years. Farooq said that once established, the technology could be deployed in other research roles outside cinema. “It is envisaged that once the technology has been fine tuned it could be used by market researchers in all kinds of settings, including monitoring reactions to shop window displays,” he said.

The project partners are being funded by the Knowledge Transfer Partnership and a grant from the Technology Strategy Board.