Loneliness Assuaged: Eye-Tracking an Audience Watching Barrage Videos

During barrage video studies, the focus is on the emotional needs of the audience. We can use eye tracking to objectively track the proposed match at a satisfaction model. Eye tracking documents, watching behaviorals, allows the determination of where our audience is paying attention.

We are watching rational and emotional and the barrage process and barrage content. Demonstrating the procedure will be Yao Shiwei, Liu Cong and Chen Ruixue;masters students from our laboratory. Before beginning an experiment, use the third edition of the UCLA scale of loneliness to allow categorization of the participants into lonely and normal groups, according to their score.

Select emotional and rational appeal, one minute standalone video advertisements that do not require contextual information to comprehend. To ensure that the emotional and rational appeals are manipulated successfully, have non-participants view and rate a pool of preselected ads based on these appeals. To maximize manipulation, select videos with the highest scores in either category as the experimental stimuli.

Use video editing software to convert the barrage into subtitles so that comments can be manually added to the video barrage area. The ready-made video can then be culled in the data collection process. To randomize the presentational effects, produce four presentation orders for the experiment.

After selecting a commercial eye tracker, set the default setting for the tracker gaze sample rate at 60 Hertz per second. Attach the eye tracker to the computer and ask the participant to read and sign an informed consent form. When the participant has given consent, have the participant sit comfortably in front of the test computer and check and adjust the chair height as necessary so that the TV screen is at the participant's eye level.

Inform the participant that a five-point calibration is necessary to achieve the highest accuracy in data collection and to track the participant's gaze within two degrees of accuracy and instruct the participant to sit still while following a moving red dot on the computer screen with both eyes, fixating on the dot when it stops. After the calibration, check the tracker software to see if the participant missed a calibration point and have the participant click the left mouse button to start a practice test. After the practice test start the main experiment and inform the participant that they will see a red plus sign in the middle of the screen for 500 milliseconds indicating the start of the experiment.

Instruct the participant to watch the first video while the eye tracking is on. After the first video, have the participant complete the questionnaire that will automatically pop up. After completing the questionnaire, have the participant click the left mouse button and complete a battery of evaluative measures on their satisfaction with the video.

After rating the first video, ask the participant if they would prefer to take a break or to continue on to another video. Then repeat the advertisement viewing and rating procedure seven more times before thanking, debriefing, and paying the participant for their time. To analyze the eye tracking data, slice the entire recording into eight segments corresponding to each ad watching segment.

Each clip should contain the original ad and eye movement data. In the sliced video, use the tracker software to draw an area of interest to distinguish between the eye movement data in the barrage and non barrage areas. Then count the number of fixations for each video segment and separate them into barrage and non-barrage area of interest fixations.

To calculate the eye fixation durations, compare the duration and number of fixations at the barrage area of interest relative to the entire scene to allow inference of where the participants were focusing and of which elements were being paid attention to while watching the videos. Then analyze the self-reported data to determine the participant's satisfaction toward each video. Repeated measure multi-variate analyses of variants can be conducted using duration and fixation as dependent variables to indicate attention.

As confirmed by these results, lonely participants'gazes stay on barrage areas longer than all non barrage areas when emotional ads are presented. When rational ads are viewed, however, no such difference is observed. This pattern was not replicated for low loneliness participants whose attention remained statistically non-significant when watching emotional or rational ads.

In addition, participants'satisfaction with the observed videos, largely replicated the duration and fixation results;with lonely audiences reporting a level of satisfaction when watching emotional ads over rational ads and with no statistical differences reported for either interaction in non-lonely audiences. The person who adds the barrage should be someone who watches the barrage videos, add the content and the format to be sure to conform to the characteristics of the normal barrage.