The Subconscious Director: Dynamically Personalizing Videos Using Gaze Data

Abstract

Watching TV has become a side event rather than a deliberate pastime. Movie directors thus struggle to find new ways to sustain the attention of their audience. Interactive movies usually require the viewer to actively decide how the plot progresses, creating an experience more akin to video games than film. In this paper, we propose a system that analyses gaze data to personalize the plot of a video without the viewer's active intervention. User preferences are inferred from their gaze allocation to different elements in a scene. The subsequent scene is then dynamically tailored towards the user's predicted preference. In a user study (N = 175), we evaluate the effectiveness of the system with regard to user engagement. Our findings show that personalized videos have a positive effect on focused attention and involvement, whereas novelty perception is not significantly affected.