A Taxonomy of Six Perceptual Cues Underlying Photorealism in 3D-Rendered Architectural Scenes: A Cue-Based Narrative Review

TL;DR

This paper identifies six visual cues that people use to judge photorealism in 3D architectural renderings, showing that realism depends more on perceptual consistency than scene complexity.

Contribution

The paper introduces a taxonomy of six perceptual cues that consistently influence photorealism judgments in 3D architectural scenes.

Findings

Perceived photorealism relies on six consistent visual cues rather than scene complexity.

Realism judgments depend on cue consistency and plausibility for shape, material, and spatial layout inferences.

Photorealism emerges from alignment of rendered images with learned perceptual expectations from real-world experience.

Abstract

Perceived photorealism in architectural 3D rendering is not determined solely by physical accuracy or rendering complexity but also by a limited set of visual cues that observers rely on when judging realism. This literature review synthesizes findings from 41 peer-reviewed studies spanning perception science, computer graphics, and immersive visualization, with the aim of identifying the cues that most strongly contribute to perceived photorealism in rendered scenes. Convergent evidence from psychophysical experiments, user studies in virtual and augmented reality, and rendering-oriented analyses indicate that six cue categories consistently dominate realism judgments. Across the reviewed literature, realism judgments depend less on scene complexity or the number of visual elements and more on the consistency and plausibility of these cues for supporting inferences about shape, material, and spatial layout. These findings suggest that photorealism emerges from the alignment of the rendered image structure with perceptual expectations learned from real-world visual experience. The implications for architectural visualization workflows and directions for future research on cue interactions and perceptual thresholds are discussed.

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