Display-Size Dependent Effects of 3D Viewing on Subjective Impressions

This paper describes how the screen size of 3D displays affect the subjective impressions of 3D-visualized content. The key requirement for 3D displays is the presentation of depth cues comprising binocular disparities and/or motion parallax; however, the development of displays and production of content that include these cues leads to an increase in costs. Given the variety of screen sizes, it is expected that 3D characteristics are experienced differently by viewers depending on the screen size. We asked 48 participants to evaluate the 3D experience when using three different-sized stereoscopic displays (11.5, 55, and 200 inches) with head trackers. The participants were asked to score presented stimuli on 20 opposite-term pairs based on the semantic differential method after viewing each of six stimuli. Using factor analysis, we extracted three principal factors: power, related to strong three-dimensionality, real, etc.; visibility, related to stable, natural, etc.; and space, related to agile, open, etc., which had proportions of variances of 0.317, 0.277, and 0.251, respectively; their cumulation was 0.844. We confirmed that the three different-sized displays did not produce the same subjective impressions of the 3D characteristics. In particular, on the small-sized display, we found larger effects on power and space impressions from motion parallax (η² = 0.133 and 0.161, respectively) than for the other two sizes. We found degradation of the visibility impressions from binocular disparities, which might be caused by artifacts from stereoscopy. The effects of 3D viewing on subjective impression depends on the display size, and small-sized displays offer the largest benefits by adding 3D characteristics to 2D visualization.