The Anonymous Audience Analyzer: Visualizing Audience Behavior in Public Space

With dropping hardware prices, an increasing number of interactive displays is being deployed in public space. To investigate and understand the impact of novel interaction techniques, content, and display properties, researchers and practitioners alike rely on observations of the audience. While in-situ observations are costly in terms of time and effort, video data allows situations in front of the display to be analyzed post-hoc. In many situations, however, video recordings are not possible since the privacy of users needs to be protected. To address this challenge, we present a tool that allows scenes in front of a display to be reconstructed from Kinect data (user position and body posture) and visualized in a virtual environment. In this way, the privacy of the audience can be preserved while allowing display owners to run in-depth investigations of their display installations.