Evaluation of Virtual Audience Synchronized with Cheering Motion of the User's Light Stick During Music Concerts

Remote concerts lack the feeling of unity that traditional concerts provide. A system is needed that can create interactions between audience members and provide remote concerts with a feeling of unity. This paper suggests a virtual audience model as a means to enhance the feeling of unity among remote music concert attendees. The model emulates the movement of light sticks in the venue by synchronizing the movement of the virtual audience with the user's movement. The phases of the waving motion of the user's light stick are recognized, and the virtual audience's phases are ascertained using the Kuramoto model. This establishes the cheering behavior of the virtual audience, which reproduces the propagation of the light-stick waving motion as the behavior of the virtual audience. An experiment was carried out in a virtual space to evaluate the psychological impact of the propagation of the user's movements to the virtual audience using the proposed method. The experiment was performed with 12 fans of the artists in a content video. According to the Inclusion of Other in the Self (IOS) scale, the proposed method significantly increased the feeling of unity with the virtual audience experienced by the users.