Officially called an Instrumented Auditorium, the 36-person 150m2 cinema has received a £400,000 funding grant from the Wolfson Foundation to equip it with state-of-the-art monitoring equipment to record data on audience members and how they react to the content they are watching and hearing.
It's due to open in May next year at the MyWorld creative hub at The Coal Shed on Avon Street, St Phillips, as part of the University of Bristol's new Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus.
Thanks to this additional grant, the controlled environment will record audiences' biometric responses to what they're watching and hearing, including their heartrate, eye movement and brain activity. Researchers will even be able to monitor the electrical properties of people’s skin to gauge their subconscious emotional and sympathetic responses.
These new insights will underpin future commissioning, directorial and production approaches to new content creation using emerging creative technologies.