Abstraction Beats Realism: Physiological Visualizations Enhance Arousal Synchrony in VR Concert Recreations

2026-03-20

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of replicating the collective physiological arousal and emotional resonance experienced by audiences at live concerts within virtual reality (VR), where existing evaluations rely on intrusive subjective self-reports that disrupt immersion. To overcome this limitation, the authors introduce inter-subject physiological synchrony as an objective metric, quantifying alignment between VR users’ arousal patterns and those of original concertgoers through skin conductance recordings and dynamic time warping (DTW). Comparing three levels of visual abstraction—realistic 360° video, hybrid visualization, and fully abstract physiological representation—the findings demonstrate that abstract physiological visualization achieves significantly higher synchrony than realistic video, both overall and during musical climaxes. These results validate the efficacy and advantage of abstract representations in enhancing affective immersion in VR environments.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Affective Computing
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Computer Vision: Visual Reasoning & Symbolic Representations

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success

Abstract

Live cultural experiences like concerts generate shared physiological arousal among audience members, a collective resonance that contributes to their emotional power. Recreating such experiences in virtual reality therefore requires not just audiovisual fidelity, but reproduction of this physiological dimension. Yet current VR evaluation methods rely on post-hoc self-reports that interrupt immersion and cannot capture moment-to-moment arousal dynamics. We propose cross-temporal physiological synchrony as an unobtrusive methodology for evaluating VR cultural recreations: measuring how closely a VR participant's arousal patterns align with those of the original live audience. In a two-phase study, we recorded electrodermal activity from 40 live concert attendees, then created three VR recreations with varying abstraction levels (realistic 360-degree video, mixed video-plus-visualization, and fully abstract physiological representations) and measured synchrony with 22 laboratory participants using Dynamic Time Warping. Contrary to assumptions favoring realism, abstract visualizations achieved the strongest synchrony with live audiences. During musical climaxes, the abstract condition maintained correlation while realistic video showed none. These findings suggest that abstract physiological representations may be more effective than realistic footage for evoking authentic collective engagement in VR cultural recreations.

Problem

• physiological synchrony
• virtual reality
• cultural experience
• arousal dynamics
• concert recreation

Innovation

• physiological synchrony
• virtual reality
• abstract visualization
• Dynamic Time Warping
• collective arousal