A juicy orange makes for a tastier juice: The neglected role of visual material perception in packaging design

Food appearance sets intentions and expectations. When designing packaged food much attention is devoted to packaging elements like color and shape, but less to the characteristics of the images used. To our awareness, no study has yet investigated how the appearance of the food shown on the package affects consumers’ preferences. Often, orange...

MatMix 1.0: Using optical mixing to probe visual material perception

MatMix 1.0 is a novel material probe we developed for quantitatively measuring visual perception of materials. We implemented optical mixing of four canonical scattering modes, represented by photographs, as the basis of the probe. In order to account for a wide range of materials, velvety and glittery (asperity and mesofacet scattering) were...

Contextual effects on real bicolored glossy surfaces

The material property of glossiness, which is attributed to many objects in our daily life, is physically independent of the objects' color. However, perceived glossiness can change with the contrast between the highlight and the area around the specular highlight. Hitherto, experiments mainly investigated gloss on unicolored surfaces. It is...

Painterly depiction of material properties

Painters are masters of depiction and have learned to evoke a clear perception of materials and material attributes in a natural, three-dimensional setting, with complex lighting conditions. Furthermore, painters are not constrained by reality, meaning that they could paint materials without exactly following the laws of nature, while still...

Material properties and image cues for convincing grapes: The know-how of the 17th-century pictorial recipe by Willem Beurs

Painters mastered replicating the regularities of the visual patterns that we use to infer different materials and their properties, via meticulous observation of the way light reveals the world's textures. The convincing depiction of bunches of grapes is particularly interesting. A convincing portrayal of grapes requires a balanced...

Effects of light map orientation and shape on the visual perception of canonical materials

We previously presented a systematic optics-based canonical approach to test material-lighting interactions in their full natural ecology, combining canonical material and lighting modes. Analyzing the power of the spherical harmonics components of the lighting allowed us to predict the lighting effects on material perception for generic...