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Genre Matters: A Comparative Study on the Entertainment Effects of 3D in Cinematic Contexts

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3D Research

Abstract

Built upon prior comparative studies of 3D and 2D films, the current project investigates the effects of 2D and 3D on viewers’ perception of enjoyment, narrative engagement, presence, involvement, and flow across three movie genres (Action/fantasy vs. Drama vs. Documentary). Through a 2 by 3 mixed factorial design, participants (n = 102) were separated into two viewing conditions (2D and 3D) and watched three 15-min film segments. Result suggested both visual production methods are equally efficient in terms of eliciting people’s enjoyment, narrative engagement, involvement, flow and presence, no effects of visual production method was found. In addition, through examining the genre effects in both 3D and 2D conditions, we found that 3D works better for action movies than documentaries in terms of eliciting viewers’ perception of enjoyment and presence, similarly, it improves views’ narrative engagement for documentaries than dramas substantially. Implications and limitations are discussed in detail.

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Notes

  1. To ensure that we did not exclude other salient covariate factors, we also analyzed the data again by means of MANCOVA, with genre attitudes and attitude toward 2D/3D as co-variables. Since the overall pattern of results was similar to what we got from MANOVA, we only report MANOVA results here.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Communication, Florida State University, University Center C 3100, Tallahassee, FL, 32306, USA

    Qihao Ji & Young Sun Lee

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  1. Qihao Ji
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  2. Young Sun Lee
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Correspondence to Qihao Ji.

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Ji, Q., Lee, Y.S. Genre Matters: A Comparative Study on the Entertainment Effects of 3D in Cinematic Contexts. 3D Res 5, 15 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13319-014-0015-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13319-014-0015-6

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