Using subjective and physiological measures to evaluate audience-participating movie experience

Abstract

In this paper we subjectively and physiologically investigate the effects of the audiences' 3D virtual actor in a movie on their movie experience, using the audience-participating movie DIM as the object of study. In DIM, the photo-realistic 3D virtual actors of audience are constructed by combining current computer graphics (CG) technologies and can act different roles in a pre-rendered CG movie. To facilitate the investigation, we presented three versions of a CG movie to an audience-a Traditional version, its Self-DIM (SDIM) version with the participation of the audience's virtual actor, and its Self-Friend-DIM (SFDIM) version with the coparticipation of the audience and his friends' virtual actors. The results show that the participation of audience's 3D virtual actors indeed cause increased subjective sense of presence and engagement, and emotional reaction; moreover, SFDIM performs significantly better than SDIM, due to increased social presence. Interestingly, when watching the three movie versions, subjects experienced not only significantly different galvanic skin response (GSR) changes on average-changing trend over time, and number of fluctuations-but they also experienced phasic GSR increase when watching their own and friends' virtual 3D actors appearing on the movie screen. These results suggest that the participation of the 3D virtual actors in a movie can improve interaction and communication between audience and the movie.

Subjective measures of presence and discomfort in viewers of color‐separation‐based stereoscopic cinema

“…It might be partly explained through the lack of interaction because the viewers sat passively in their seats. Our results might be different if the viewers have had a chance to behave like a real concert audience does (see, for example, Lin et al 7 ; Heeter 37 ; Lombard and Ditton 1 ).…”

“…Some users thought that glasses improved the 3-D experience, but most of the people would not wear them if it could be an option. In summary, it seems that people were impressed and enjoyed the 3-D presentation: it looked and felt real from many viewpoints and the experience was immersive (see, for example, Lombard et al 1 ; Lin et al 7 ; IJjsselsteijn et al 20 Seuntiëns et al 5 ). Still, most of the people did not feel that they were actors within the virtual world or the virtual characters were part of the real world.…”

Enriching shared experience by collective heart rate

“…We conducted two different pilot studies based on the collective HR. The first pilot succeeded in eliciting sense of presence through the commentator's announcements, engagement, and in enhancing interaction and communication between audience and hockey game; in addition, similarly to Lin et al (2008) study, the study also shows potential of physiological evaluation techniques in objectively evaluating user experience. Furthermore, the follow-up study supports these results.…”

“…In Lin et al's (2008) study they subjectively and physiologically investigated the effects of the audiences' 3D virtual actor in a movie on their movie experience, using the audience-participating movie DIM as the object of study. They, based on the existing literature, chose to collect GSR and electrocardiogram (EKG) signals to evaluate audience experience.…”

Do we react in the same manner?

“…There have been articles reporting the use of physiological sensors as objective evaluation mechanisms [16,5]. Others have explored the relationship between biosensor data and subjective methods [15,11]; and most of the work has been targeted to label the users' affective states [10] (e.g., fatigue). Moreover, in most of the cases the user studies were conducted in lab settings and the results were based on the averaged performance of the group (and not on the performance of the individuals).…”