Viewing experience of 3DTV: An exploration of the feeling of sickness and presence in a shopping mall

The adoption and deployment of 3DTV can be seen as a major step in the history of television, comparable to the transition from analogue to digital and standard to high definition TV. Although 3D is expected to emerge from the cinema to peoples’ home, there is still a lack of knowledge on how people (future end users) perceive 3DTV and how this influences their viewing experience as well as their acceptance of 3DTV. Within this paper, findings from a three-day field evaluation study on people’s 3DTV experiences, focusing on the feeling of sickness and presence, are presented. Contrary to the traditional controlled laboratory setting, the study was conducted in the public setting of a shopping center and involved 700 participants. The study revealed initial insights on users’ feeling of presence and sickness when watching 3DTV content. Results from this explorative study show that most of the participants reported symptoms of sickness after watching 3DTV with an effect of gender and age on the reported feeling of sickness. Our results further suggest that the users’ previous experience with 3D content has an influence on how realistic people rate the viewing experience and how involved they feel. The particularities of the study environment, a shopping mall, are reflected in our findings and future research directions and action points for investigating people’s viewing experiences of 3DTV are summarized.