When giving a presentation to an audience, a speaker can observe the audience to some degree, but experience difficulty assessing how the audience is reacting to the speaker's presentation style, and presentation materials. The audience can be engaging in side conversations, utilizing mobile devices to access the internet, leaving the room during the presentation, or looking away from the speaker or not paying attention to the speaker. During presentations to large audiences, the speaker will have more difficulty assessing the degree to which the audience is paying adequate attention.
It was known to automatically measure the response of an audience to provided entertainment by US Pub. No.: US 2002/0073417 A1 by Kondo et al., teaching detection of an overall state of an audience, detection of individual states of members of an audience, and determining an audience response on the basis of the detected information. A playback output control system first determines the response of an audience in a hall to the object of entertainment such as a movie, and then controls the playback of the movie and the like based on the thus determined audience response. An audience response determination apparatus or in the playback output control system can utilize images of the audience, sounds generated by the audience, loads applied to each of the seats by each member of the audience, and a stepping force provided by each member of the audience to detect the overall state of the audience. A playback output control method comprises the steps of detecting an overall state of an audience, detecting individual states of the members of the audience, determining an audience response on the basis of information detected by the steps of detecting the overall state of the audience and detecting the individual states of the members of the audience, and controlling the playback operation of data to be watched or listened to by the audience on the base of the audience response determined in the determination step.