I guess this could have just been a shower thought as well…
As other people said, it’s novelty. Being near-sighted, I get that effect in real-life when I get new glasses. Everything looks incredibly detailed and amazing for a couple days until I get used to it.
I’m terribly nearsighted myself. You’re probably already aware of this, but if you find yourself without your glasses and you need to see something far away, use your phone.
You can see your phone, and your phone can see far away.
Damn…jealous that my phone has better vision than me.
because the thing on the screen doesn’t really exist, so when it appears to really exist it feels like magic
Color saturation
The most impressive screens have super-saturated color and images that are shot by professional filmographers/photographers. It’s hard to compose a scene in real life but professionals do it every day and the TV is how many of them showcase their work. If you look hard enough and try hard enough then you too will find some really amazing and beautiful images with your eyes. -Polarizers help, too.
This. My phone camera takes ultra high resolution pictures then algorithmically processes them. They look more beautiful and real than reality.
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It’s a technological feat and you love to be part of this progress. Remember when graphics were shit, wheels were square and textures were a washed out blob of color, but we were impressed because we knew this was another breakthrough. Now we still find ways to improve graphics even though last week we thought this was as realistic as it gets. When you play games, you also look at it from the perspective of how advanced it is.
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These days we get to see perfect worlds on screen. Developers make sure that every corner has something to look at, colors pop, everything is neatly arranged, the light perfectly fits the mood. Maybe it rains in-game but you don’t have the annoying real-life effect of getting soaked, so you can simply enjoy how it looks and sounds. You know sometimes in the real world you think, wow this view looks really amazing and you pull out your phone to capture it? In modern games that happens more often and in the right moments. It’s all orchestrated.
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Lighting
Speak for yourself, I think reality is fucking gorgeous. That’s why people try so hard to evoke its appearance in the first place, not only on screen but on canvas and in sculpture and prose.
That’s why my favorite art isn’t realistic at all; if I wanted to see the most beautiful realism around, I could just walk to a lake.
During the third or fourth time I was mad that 3D hadn’t taken off like technicolor, I though “fine! I’ll just look at trees and hallways in real life then!” And yeah, it kinda works.
There’s a lot of beauty in the world if you just, you know, look at it.
In a game, movie, work of literature or theater, your feeling of awe and immersion is maintained by something called the “magic circle”. It is an area of experience that is separated from normal reality by the proverbial 4th wall.
Everything inside the magic circle is filled with artistic purpose, it works (in good works) to drive meaning and communicate themes and ideas of the art work.
Whenever this magic circle is broken, you suspension of disbelief becomes overtaken by cynicism, and the immersion is gone.
Mundane life is full of this cynicism, because we are not conditioned (anymore) to find mundane reality purposeful, outside of really outstanding and dire situations. We take reality with it’s amazing graphics and narrative for granted, not noticing the magic.
Have you ever looked at a flower? There’s colors that I just don’t see on screens.
You know the film 300? If you ever play it with the saturation way waay down, it looks mundane as hell. Just a bunch of guys without shirts walking around.
That’s funny, I’ll have to try it. I always wondered what Frank Miller did to achieve those weird camera effects he gets in Sin City and 300
- intensely_human ( @intensely_human@lemm.ee ) 6•2 months ago
I guess you’re not taking the time to appreciate the beauty of the real world?
Where I live, it’s all very beautiful. I’ve not had the experience you’re describing, where the detail of the world is mundane.
Is it?
Novelty is a natural part of human experience. The only way we can exist is if things are not as incredibly mind bending as the first time you see them.
We perceive reality from the moment we open our eyes upon being born. By the time you comprehend what reality is, it’s old hat. This happens to everything, from the first time you see a good movie, to the first time you drive a car on the freeway, eventually everything that we do repeatedly loses its novelty so that the human mind isn’t constantly blown by all the crazy shit going on.
Because that’s comparing oranges to apples.
In terms of pure image quality, real objects would win every time because they only have to be filtered by our eyes - digital images are filtered through the GPU and screen before ever reaching our eyes.
As such, the real contest is the ability of displays to make digital images look comparable to those real objects - because that’s harder to do vs. ust looking at the real life object, it’s more impressive to us.
Light projection. Others have hit on the psychosocial aspects, but watch a dull projector of the same video as an OLED TV and see how much better the TV is, and how the dim projector is worse than the real world. The simulated brightness and contrast play a big role in the “magical” feeling because our eyes are typically interpreting light via lower-level reflection.
Another way to reproduce this is to look around a big city with lights everywhere at night vs daytime.