Subjective measures of presence and discomfort in viewers of color-separation-based stereoscopic cinema Monika Pölönen (SID Member) Marja Salmimaa Viljakaisa Aaltonen Jukka Häkkinen (SID Member) Jari Takatalo Abstract — The experience of various people related to a real 3-D cinema visit has been studied, and the results will be discussed. This study has two distinct parts, which includes the comfort of the viewers and their sense of presence. Eighty-four viewers filled out questionnaires about comfort and visual strain. Forty-one subjects described their presence experience during the movie presentation. A majority of the people felt comfortable after the movie viewing; they experienced only mild-eye- strain-related symptoms. People evaluated the movie world as highly realistic, but they did not feel that they were actors in the virtual-movie world. Most of the participants would recommend 3-D cinema to friends because it was a very entertaining experience. Keywords — 3-D movie, discomfort, subjective experience. DOI # 10.1889/JSID17.5.459 1 Introduction On August 27, 2008, at 3:00 p.m., 84 participants experi- enced the 3-D virtual movie, U2 3-D. 3-D media presenta- tions are commonly evaluated relative to the viewers’ comfort, but they are also connected to the reality experi- ence. To study both aspects of a 3-D-movie experience, we carried out the research in the 3-D-cinema context without any preselection of viewers or experiment setup manipula- tions. 2 Presence research In 1997, Lombard and Ditton 1 published a literature review addressing the concept of presence. According to their find- ings, presence has been conceptualized in six different ways: as perceptual realism, social richness, transportation (You Are There, We Are Together/Shared Space), psychological immersion/engagement, social actor within medium, and as medium as social actor (social responses of media users to cues provided by the medium itself). Based on these con- ceptualizations, they concluded that despite the variations in descriptions, each of these aspects represents “the per- ceptual illusion of nonmediation.” Freeman 2 grouped Lom- bard’s and Ditton’s 1 six concepts into two subgroups: physical (being physically located somewhere) and social (being there together with someone). IJsselsteijn et al. 3 identified the underlying factors of presence. The first fac- tor describes the extent and fidelity of sensory information and involves useful and salient information presented to dif- ferent senses. This factor could be applied to both interac- tive and non-interactive media. The second group is related to a match between sensors and displays, and describes mapping between the user’s actions and spatio-temporal effects. The next group refers to content factors (objects, actors, events in medium), and finally; the fourth group con- centrates on user characteristics. According to the authors, the first two groups are related to the media form and enable the illusion of presence through the reconstruction of transparent media. Different problems, e.g., bad stereo- scopic alignment, weight of the glasses, and coding errors, influence the users’ concentration on media. These prob- lems then lower the presence experience. IJsselsteijn et al. 4 used a short 3-D film to study the users’ experience of presence. They concluded that stereo- scopic and motion-parallax cues increase the sense of pres- ence when depth levels were perceived as natural. Seuntiëns, Heynderickx, and IJsselsteijn 5 documented that depth is important when people evaluate viewing experi- ence and is even more important when naturalness is exam- ined. IJsselsteijn et al. 6 studied the effects of stereoscopic information, image motion, and screen size. Their results show that image motion and stereoscopic presentation as well as screen size affects the subjective presence ratings, but screen size is only important when motion stimuli were used. They also assumed that stereoscopic presentation has more effect on spatial presence/physical space than to an involvement/engagement component. In a study by Lin, Maejima, and Morishima, 7 subjects participated in an audience-participating movie with or without the presence of 3-D virtual actors/friends. They concluded that virtual actors in a movie improves the inter- action between the audience and the movie as well as increases the sense of presence. Häkkinen et al. 8 adopted a slightly different approach to movie-experience measure- ment, as they utilized a hybrid qualitative/quantitative measurement methodology, Interpretation-based quality (IBQ) (Nyman et al. 9 ; Nyman et al. 10 ; Radun et al. 11 ) used to study experiences participants obtained from movie clips. The authors are with Nokia Research Centre, Visiokatu 1, Tampere 33720, Finland; telephone +358-50-4837693, fax +358-71-8035322, e-mail: monika.polonen@nokia.com. © Copyright 2009 Society for Information Display 1071-0922/09/1705-0459$1.00 Journal of the SID 17/5, 2009 459