Beyond image quality: designing engaging interactions with digital products

electronicimaging.org • Tel: +1 703 642 9090 • Fax: +1 703 642 9094 • [email protected] describe a study of the dimensionality of visual complexity in computer graphics scenes. We present an experiment where subjects judged the relative complexity of 21 high-resolution building, room, and tabletop scenes, rendered with photorealistic methods. Scenes were gathered from web archives and varied in theme, number and layout of objects, material properties, and lighting. Multidimensional scaling of pooled subject responses embeds the stimulus images in a two-dimensional space, with axes of “numerosity” and “material / lighting complexity”. In a follow-up analysis, we derive a one-dimensional complexity ordering of the stimulus images and show discrepancies between this ordering and several computable complexity metrics, such as scene polygon count and JPEG compression size.