 Measuring people's responses to entertainment has, in the past, been pretty low-tech. People might answer a survey, give thumbs up or five stars in an app, or simply describe how they felt while they were watching something. But now scientists have access to a variety of biosensors that can tell them exactly how people are responding to movies and TV shows, what gets their hearts pumping, or what makes their faces flush. And this physiological data has the potential to change how movies are made in the future. In fact, it's doing that right now. Dolby Labs has been around since 1965. For most people, the company is synonymous with that label you see on movies that tells you the sound has been remastered or the color has been enhanced. But inside its headquarters in San Francisco, Dolby has been working on a lesser-known project— to watch people while they're watching movies. The scientists at Dolby want to know whether people are cognitively involved, or stressed, or aroused. And they want this biophysical data to better sell their technology. The idea being that Dolby can show its Hollywood partners that a certain color, or surround sound, or even high dynamic range, will elicit a stronger response from people. One of the lead image scientists from Pixar, in charge of Inside Out, he says, when the baby's born in Inside Out, what do you get? This diffuse white screen. What we wanted there was pain. We wanted people to feel physiological pain, because that's what happens when a baby's born. And so it's this way of now thinking about the physiological response is part of what we can create in the color space. We can create that in this multi-sensory space, and that's really powerful to the creators. That's Dolby chief scientist Poppy Crum. She's a neurophysiologist who, on any given day, is conducting 15 to 20 experiments with willing subjects. I was curious to hear what these biosensors are telling Poppy and her team, so I decided to try on the sensors myself. One of the beauties of this particular device, so again, it's an EEG, which stands for electroencephalogram, and it lets us measure small changes in the electrical signals from your brain through your scalp. Am I in the matrix yet? And what's this? These are a few other sensors that we're going to put on you. One of these is going to measure your heart rate. Another one of the sensors is a lie detector. And off to your left, that's actually your thermal image. Am I sweating? Ooh, armpit sweat. The data that's popping up on the screen right now from the sensors I'm wearing, what is that telling you? So what we've done is we're just amplifying some of those channels, and this is your raw EEG signal from each of those electrodes. So you have your GSR response, and here's your heart rate. So what are the kinds of things that would cause, aside from fire, like a pretty serious spike? Sports matches, those are great examples where, you know, if there's something like a penalty kick, where there's anticipation, where things that surprise you, things that are arousing. So you can actually tell when people are aroused. Absolutely. Do you test it on sex scenes? Oh, no. So when we use the word arousal, I like to use the word excitement typically. Maybe I was jumping to a conclusion there. Yeah, so be careful there. These biophysical labs have existed at Doldey since 2012, but over the past couple years, Poppy and her team have really ramped up the program. This is partly due to the fact that these kinds of sensors are readily available now, but it's also due to the fact that there are now displays bright enough to trigger these kinds of reactions. In some cases, the team is using devices that get up to 20,000 candelas per square meter in terms of brightness, and that can have a surprising impact on the human body. We have discovered that if you present flame, a picture of flame realistically enough, your body actually starts to flush. Your body is just over the eons, has adjusted and adapted such that when it sees flame, it assumes hot. That kind of insight is fundamental in helping us shape the technologies that drive the stories that you and I love to go to. Doldey is hardly the first entertainment-focused company to study human emotions. Broadly speaking, this kind of effective computing has been studied for decades. But industry experts say it's becoming much more common in entertainment. In recent years, companies like Netflix and Hulu have used eye trackers to better understand how people are reacting to their app interfaces. These types of biophysical experiences are becoming more and more important. We need to be able to understand the nature of the human body and how it's important. We need to understand experiences about engagement, how you're emotionally connected to the experience you're having, and how our technologies can help us enhance that, enrich it as much as possible. Of course, all of this biosensory tracking could raise questions around the ethics of potentially using the data in a more manipulative way. If filmmakers or sound producers know that they can trigger an emotional response, then isn't it possible for those tools to be abused? Or, say an advertiser uses these tools to sell you something, like this Lexus ad which offers nothing but the sound of an engine revving. And which, by the way, was mixed by Dolby. But ultimately, when it comes to entertainment, that's sort of what you want. You're going for an intensified human experience. The core of our technology and the existence of our company has always been an understanding of human experience. And how can we take what we experience, how our brain experiences the world, how our bodies experience it, and really use that to build intelligent technologies. Basically, we're more immersed in video than ever before, whether it's on a giant movie or TV screen, on our relatively small smartphones, or even right on our faces, like with VR headsets. And Dolby scientists, along with many others in the industry, want to know how that's going to make us all feel, especially if entertainment becomes indistinguishable from the realities around us. So the next time you feel your face flush or your heart race or your armpit sweat during a movie or TV show, you might not be the only one. In fact, it might have been enhanced to trigger exactly that sort of reaction. This is definitely a future of home entertainment. I've been reading a lot about sharks lately.