“Many Worlds” short film uses real-time audience biometrics to determine plot

A new short film called “Many Worlds” debuts next month and uses biometrics to measure audience tension to determine how the film will end.

The film will debut on February 23 at the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival in Plymouth, UK and is loosely based on the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment which suggests that observed outcomes create different versions of reality.

According to a report in The Verge, “at the start of the film, a handful of audience members will be fitted with sensors that detect their heart rate, brainwave activity, perspiration, or muscle tension. As it progresses, the story will periodically branch based on how they respond, leading to one of the four endings.”

The film is approximately 15-minutes long and follows the story of a high-school physics student who has sealed herself in a coffin-sized box with a cyanide gas-capsule connected to a Gieger counter and the questions and physical and psychological questions that surround her experiment.

In the verge report: “if an audience gets bored during a slow section, the next segment will speed up; if they’re ‘too happy,’ the next section might be meant to depress them. Even outside the fairly novel take on an interactive film, that means any given viewer’s experience will be dictated by the people around them.”

Also reported in Geekosystem.com, Alexis Kirke, the writer and director of the film is the composer-in-residence for the Plymouth Marine Institute, and is known for this sort of experimental and immersive art.

Article Topics

art  |  biometrics  |  brainwave  |  muscle tension