From director’s cut to user’s cut: To watch a brain-controlled film is to edit it

Ramchurn, Richard; Martindale, Sarah; Wilson, Max L.; Benford, Steve

Abstract

© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Introducing interactivity to films has proven a longstanding and difficult challenge due to their narrative-driven, linear and theatre-based nature. Previous research has suggested that Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) may be a promising approach but also revealed a tension between being immersed in the film and thinking about control. We report a performance-led and in-the-wild study of a BCI film called The MOMENT covering its design rationale and how it was experienced by the public as controllers, non-controllers and repeat viewers. Our findings suggest that BCI movies should be designed to be credibly controllable, generate personal versions, be watchable as linear films, encourage repeat viewing and fit the medium of cinema. They also reveal how viewers appreciated the sense of editing their own personal cuts, suggesting a new stance on introducing interactivity into lean-back media in which filmmakers release editorial control to users to make their own versions.

Citation

Ramchurn, R., Martindale, S., Wilson, M. L., & Benford, S. (2019). From director’s cut to user’s cut: To watch a brain-controlled film is to edit it. In CHI '19: proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (1-14). https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300378

• Conference Name: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
• Conference Location: Glasgow, UK
• Start Date: May 4, 2019
• End Date: May 9, 2019
• Acceptance Date: Jan 9, 2019
• Publication Date: May 2, 2019
• Deposit Date: Jan 14, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 15, 2019
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Volume: 2019-May
• Pages: 1-14
• Book Title: CHI '19: proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• ISBN: 9781450359702
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300378
• Keywords: Human-centered computing; Interaction paradigms
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1468705
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3290605.3300378
• Additional Information: Paper No.: 148