[johnqian]

This appraisal of Van Eyck's painting strikes me as odd. If my mission was to paint a room as photorealistically as possible, I would certainly notice all the differences between my painting and reality, I think anyone would. What differentiates a great painter, I think, is not whether they _notice_ the details, but whether they have the skill and care to actually reproduce them all. But maybe I'm wrong? Do people here feel like they wouldn't realize why their dog fur didn't look realistic, even if they had a real dog right in front of them?

I find this hard to believe because Unity recently released a digital human demo far more realistic than this painting, yet HN attacked it for having slightly unrealistic teeth lighting.

The answer to this actually affects my work; I do UI design, and I've always assumed that when engineers implement my designs a little off, it's because they didn't think the details were important. If it's because they actually don't see the difference at all, that's an easier problem to solve.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Uncanny valley is a context problem. Weird-looking teeth aren't just a trivial detail, they ruin the credibility of the whole.

Great artists don't just notice and represent (and abstract) details, they frame them in a context which is greater than the sum of its parts.

The Van Eyck isn't really photorealistic. It wasn't possible to paint true photorealism back then because you need modern pigments and media to do that. But it isn't even what Van Eyck was trying to do.

The painting is really about a story, and the details are there to make the story feel more vivid. There's certainly an element of exploring representation and technique for its own sake. But the point of the painting is the story it tells - the experience it creates - not whether the dog's fur and the mirror are perfectly rendered.

It's very difficult to get engineers to think in terms of viewer/user experience. Engineer brains are focussed on solving technical problems and creating tools, not on creating delightful or captivating experiences for non-engineers.

Business people can be slightly better at experiences, but there's always the shady temptation to create manipulative and exploitative experiences.

The arts are the only place where the audience experience is the main point of the exercise. Technical skill is only ever a means to an end, and if the end doesn't work on its own terms the technical skill is irrelevant.

[cjsawyer]

I think that there’s a difference between just seeing something and taking it in deeply enough to carry the information into their minds eye and then transfer that onto a canvas through finger movements. I’m absolutely no expert here but it seems like the physical reproduction step (moving paint around) is secondary to the skills involved with the first step, even if that’s what people equate to being an artist.

[pksebben]

it's less about knowing what the details are, and more about gestalt perspective. great artists notice not just which details are present, but how they affect the consciousness of the viewer.

Take the highlights of the beads - it's that contrast between light and dark in that precise context that draws the eye to the glass shapes draped against the wall. The dog contains a different kind of detail - the gentle strokes of fur give it a sense of being organic, and the glint in the eye gives it a sense of being alive.

The skill and care lies in both being able to see these details, and understand what the affect of them is. Of course, then there's the discipline required to pay the right sort of attention to these details while engaged in the cognitively heavy task of rendering. Painting takes an enormous amount of focus on material - especially in a time when one had to mix their own colors from a pretty paltry set of naturally available pigments (relatively speaking).

If I were to take this approach to UI design, I would be focused on the experience of the user as they interacted with a UI (perhaps this is why the term UX is everywhere) - what is the first thing the eye is drawn to? What extra steps are introduced by such-and-such widget? Is there a feeling of intuitiveness and does the interface flow naturally with the purpose of the tool?

When it comes to engineers implementing designs "off" - that's most likely a communication issue. They may not understand why X detail is important.

[dceddia]

I think with the UI designs being implemented wrong, it could be either one, depending on how the designs are presented.

For instance say you add a fancy, colored, layered shadow to a button. If you point out “hey this shadow is 4 layers, 4 shades of red, with these different blurs and spreads” etc, and they don’t implement it, then I’d think they (a) don’t think those details matter, (b) ran out of time, (c) don’t have the CSS chops to know how to implement it (or b+c, ran out of time looking for how to do it).

On the other hand if the design is presented as a beautiful mock-up with all these fine details, but lacking specific call-outs, I wouldn’t be surprised if many engineers miss the finer details.