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

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 co-participation 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.