I have an interest in computer graphics. Specifically modelling I think. Sometimes I like to examine real world objects and think about how they might be modelled by a computer. Of course I have absolutely no experience or knowledge of this field, but I still like to contemplate nonetheless.

Today I was looking at the towels in my bathroom and I noticed that they look like crap. They have been used and washed and dryed so many times that they have become distorted due to varying amounts of stretching among the composite threads. It made me think that if I were to attempt to create a computer model of those particular towels, that no one would ever think that the model looked very realistic or accurate (no matter how good it was) unless they were shown the original towels.

The reason for this is, of course, that the towels are pretty crappy looking. The only reason my family and anyone else who sees them accepts their appearance is because people assume that the world around them is accurate. When you see something on a TV or monitor however, you are more inclined to see fault and doubt what you see. So the computer model fails while the real things are accepted.

My point is that there is a distinct possibility that computer graphics may never fully be able to recreate the real world. We (or at least me) always like to look for flaws in things that appear on screens and we avoid looking for flaws in real life (because we assume real life to be correct). So when we see a computer generated image that contains something out of the ordinary (such as horribly deformed towels) we might very well interpret the strangeness as evidence of a failure of the computer to correctly render the real world, regardless of the accuracy of the models.

Thus, even if we get to the point where everything can be recreated by a computer, it is possible that the audience may not be so accepting because the real world is full of very strange things that we only accept because they exist.