The Effects of Chair Movement and Audiences’ Empathy on Emotional Experiences in 4D Contents

Abstract

In recent times, 4D content has evolved and is expected to become increasingly popular in the future. There needs to be more research on 4D content design to enhance 4D content audiences’ emotional experience. Factors that affect emotional experience with 4D content include affect and emotion. To investigate 4D content audiences’ emotional experience, factors impacting the affective/emotional responses to 4D content were derived in the preliminary study. Among derived factors, content type, frequency of motion, the maximum angle of pitch motion, and empathic ability are selected as the variable of the main study. In this study, experiments were conducted with 16 participants experiencing 4D content via movies and rides. Fifteen dependent variables were measured: Perceived danger, Perceived urgency, Empathic danger, Empathic urgency, Worried, Scared, Confused, Enjoyed, Valence, Arousal, Satisfaction, Continuous intention to use 4D content, Immersion, Physical fatigue, and Mental fatigue. Participants evaluated the intensity of their feelings with regard to these 15 items after experiencing 4D content. The result demonstrated that increasing the frequency of motion had a negative effect on users’ scared and confused feelings. The pitch motion angle’s max level increases the intensity of scared and confused emotions. When the content type was a ride rather than a movie, the intensity of perceived urgent, empathic danger, empathic urgent, scared, confused, and arousal increased. As an introductory study on the user experience of 4D content, this study identified the design elements and levels of 4D content that affect the user’s affect/emotion. A 4D content design idea has been proposed to increase user satisfaction by investigating how the type of 4D content, the maximum angle of motion, frequency of motion, and user’s empathic ability affect the 4D content experience.