Asklemmy

Modern people lack an appreciation for the beauty of existence and the physical world. The most intricate and aesthetically pleasing creative achievements of the human race pale in comparison to the inherent beauty of nature.

because the thing on the screen doesn't really exist, so when it appears to really exist it feels like magic

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.

Because most of what you look at in real life is mundane. But go find a nice sunset or a green forest, and you can appreciate it. When you see a scene in HD or 3D on the screen, there is a heavy selection bias to show you pleasant scenes that most people seldom see in real life. If it was super 4k and 3D, but it was just your same living room you see every day, it would be uninteresting. But the same camera showing a living room in a 10 million dollar house would be interesting. (And the natural views outside even more so, most likely.)

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Lighting

Because it’s art.

There is a lot of skill and artistic talent needed to create a facsimile of real life. Anyone can draw a tree, but a realistic tree takes some amount of artistic knowledge. The more realistic the more talent that the artist shows. Similarly, when the artist deviates from recreating real life it shows an artistic vision beyond reality.

We like art because it shows a different perspective from the minds eye of the artist. And when the artist can render that vision as something that looks real, even if it couldn’t really exist, it is impressive.

Comparison mostly. HD and 3D isn't impressing you by virtue of it being superior to real life (it isn't after all), it's impressing you compared to other examples of the same thing done "worse". The best portrait artist in the world can not make something look more "real" than the reference material, but it can compared to other attempts at painting.

This is true in other natural things as well. For example, a really big tree surrounded by smaller similar sized trees feels "really impressive" compared to a mountain surrounded by other... similar sized mountains. Or why a particularly colorful plant seems impressive surrounded by a bunch of green and brown plants.

On the other hand, things like OLED screens can be impressive compared to the natural world due to their ability to arrange and display colors rarely found in nature.

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.

Well, like, to me, my thing is... a video image is much more powerful and useful than an actual event.

Like back when I used to go out, when I was last out, I was walking down the street and this guy came barrelling out of a bar - fell right in front of me and he had a knife right in his back - landed right on the ground.

And I have no reference to it now. I can't refer back to it. I can't press rewind. I can't put it on pause. I can't put it on slo-mo and see all the little details.

And the blood, it was all wrong. It didn't look like blood. The hue was off and I couldn't adjust the hue. I was seeing it for real, but it just wasn't right.

• Slacker (1991)

Is it?

The fake is of far greater value. In its deliberate attempt to be real, it's more real than the real thing.

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.

Because we are on autopilot. We don't concentrate on what we were born with. It's a part of us. There is actually a word for it that I can't remember. You don't look at everything on your way to work. You just get there and don't even think about it.

We see the world around us every day

I guess we just didn't expect to see this kind of realism from a TV screen until it came out, it was a totally new arguably ground-braking thing. Especially with fictional media, which is why James Cameron's Avatar was so great in 3D (despite being utterly boring IMO).

Think about it, the first HD television broadcasts started in the early 90s in Japan. How exciting that must've been. They even got HD movies in the form of Hi-Vision Laserdiscs.

Because what you see on your screen is new. I bet you if you did some new shit IRL, it would be more impressive than on a screen. Dude, go sky-diving, racing, diving, kayaking, snowboarding, surfing, rock climbing, or play an intense game that physically wears you out. Travel to some place with a great view in the morning to see the sunrise and nice place to see the sunset. Go see the northern lights and tell me that's mundane.

I love screens too because they let us see different worlds and even the impossible - inside of a star, quantum realms, spaceships, life as ant, other worlds, species, and a bunch of other shit, but if you see it all the time, that'll be mundane too. I fell asleep to Dune, bro. Blockbusters with special effects send me to sleep because I've seen that shit thousands of times. Just got used to it. Probably that's what happened to you.

I have a pretty shitty life, but even I don’t consider my real life to be mundane.

The real world is full of so much glorious beauty and wonder, it constantly blows my mind.

I left to wonder, why don’t you see any of this?

Habituation. We get used to seeing the same things all the time. When you do novelty or high adrenaline experiences your perception changes. Try jumping with a parachute out of a plane, or a high altitude zip lining, driving a race car around a track, etc. Aftewards you experience a sense of heightened perception and appreciation.

Because realistic graphics cause neuron activation

Get a better GPU. You can see everything going to shit in hyper realism.