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