All You Need Is LOD : Levels of Detail in Visual Augmentations for the Audience

Because they break the physical link between gestures and sound, Digital Musical Instruments offer countless opportunities for musical expression. For the same reason however, they may hinder the audience experience, making the musician contribution and expressiveness difficult to perceive. In order to cope with this issue without altering the instruments, researchers and artists alike have designed techniques to augment their performances with additional information, through audio, haptic or visual modalities. These techniques have however only been designed to offer a fixed level of information, without taking into account the variety of spectators expertise and preferences. In this paper, we investigate the design, implementation and effect on audience experience of visual augmentations with controllable level of detail (LOD). We conduct a controlled experiment with 18 participants, including novices and experts. Our results show contrasts in the impact of LOD on experience and comprehension for experts and novices, and highlight the diversity of usage of visual augmentations by spectators.