Abstract
The diversity of human perceptions of entertainment coupled with the continuous emergence of new modes of entertainment have raised a challenge in offering the entertainment environment that is properly aligned with the public interest. Entertainment preferences are known to be shaped by a combination of individuals' social and cultural background, instability in economic situation, and generational differences. In the Saudi context, many cultural considerations have created a multitude of preferences with regards to accepting newly emerged or imported entertainment methods, particularly due to the distinctive nature of the Saudi cultural context and the complexity of perceptual factors that contribute to shaping individuals' preferences in the Saudi community. In this paper we propose to utilize visual surveys as a mean for collecting and quantifying urban perceptions of entertainment, with the hope of revealing the current challenges and envisioning the potential directions of improvement. We employ visual surveys as a data collection tool to understand how people's defined expectations, prior experiences and demographic variables relate to their perceptions with regards to preferred entertainment modes. It is our hope that this research work will open the door toward utilizing the availability of crowdsourcing techniques for comparing and contrasting urban perceptions in other different cultures and contexts.