Correlation between perception of color, shadows, and surface textures and the realism of a scene in virtual reality

Head-mounted displays allow us to go through immersive experiences in virtual reality and are expected to be present in more and more applications in both recreational and professional fields. In this context, recent years have witnessed significant advances in rendering techniques following physical models of lighting and shading. The aim of this paper is to check the fidelity of the visual appearance of real objects captured through a 3D scanner, rendered in a personal computer and displayed in a virtual reality device. We have compared forward versus deferred rendering in real-time computing using two different illuminations and five artwork replicas. The survey contains seven items for each artwork (color, shading, texture, definition, geometry, chromatic aberration, and pixelation) and an extra item related to the global realism. The results confirm recent advances in virtual reality, showing considerable visual fidelity of generated to real-world images, with a rate close to 4 in a 5-step perceptive scale. They also show a high correlation of the realism sensation with the fidelity of color reproduction, material texture, and definition of the artwork replicas. Moreover, statistically significant differences between two rendering modes are found, with a higher value of realism sensation in the deferred rendering mode.