In Montreal, journalist Louis-Philippe Messier is mostly on the run, with his desk in his backpack, looking for fascinating topics and people. In this city chronicle he speaks to everyone and is interested in all areas of life.
Around forty patrons of the famous Montreal home of immersive theatrical horror Malefycia took part in an amazing experience by wearing experimental biometric glasses that identified their emotions. Did they feel mostly fear or amusement?
I asked to take part in this “psychophysiology” study in a terrible context and my results surprised me: almost no fear, but a lot of joy.
In the Seven Deadly Sins-inspired journey, I certainly felt disgust during the “Gluttony” scene where I was forced to swallow disgusting, salty Jell-O, but that moment doesn’t have much significance in the bigger picture.
For more than an hour, I smiled and laughed mostly on alert.
Am I a psychopath if I have experienced such happiness in a series of bloody, macabre or disgusting scenes?
If so, I’m far from the only one. Because that is what usually emerges from experience. Far from feeling fear or disgust, the participants showed signs of marked good mood.
“It is an ironic result. I turned to Malefycia because I wanted a context in which people are afraid, but I realize that the predominant emotion is really joy,” Frédéric Simard, the inventor of the Nucleus Hermès biometric glasses, told me. , which he perfects before marketing it.
If the participants had been randomly sorted into people who don’t like terrible things, the results would have been different. Perhaps disgust and anger would have prevailed.
“There we had a sample of people who were willing to pay almost $100 to be scared and like experiences of this kind,” notes Mr. Simard.
Photo Louis Philippe Messier
How it works?
After studying electrical engineering and neurophysiology, Frédéric Simard pooled his expertise to design relatively comfortable wearable biometric glasses with his company Re-Ak Technologie.
This mask reads emotions mechanically by detecting facial movements.
For example, there is disgust that causes the nose to wrinkle, fear that causes the jaw to open, joy that causes a smile to appear, sadness that causes the lips to curl negatively, anger that causes the eyebrows to curl to be frowned, etc.
A digital suction cup controls heart activity.
A bracelet measures the conductivity of the skin like the classic lie detector.
By combining these three biometric measurements, the Hermès device identifies emotions.
A localization system makes it possible to know where these occur in space, and a camera shows what the subject has in front of his eyes.
Photo Louis Philippe Messier
“My device finds application in marketing to psychograph the emotions of customers visiting a park or exhibition, but also in video games or in the cinema, where we try to design adaptive content depending on the emotional state of the player or viewer fluctuate,” says Mr. Simard, who benefits from sponsorship from the marketing company SOM.
Using the raw results collected, Mr. Simard will map the emotional landscape of the experience.
If he’s still trying to detect fear in those who wear his mask, perhaps Mr. Simard can turn to La Ronde, which is debuting two new haunted houses this month that excel at scaring people.
Malefycia co-founder Mathieu “Cass” Surprenant poses near decorations being prepared a few days before the opening. Photo Louis Philippe Messier
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