>Eyes and brain alike evolved over millennia to process natural scenes, forests, rivers, coastlines, open skies. These environments share a specific mathematical pattern: their visual complexity decreases predictably as you zoom in on finer and finer details.

Wut? It's precisely the opposite. Natural patterns have infinite complexity as you zoom in, and human-made patterns (most often) not.

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SoftTalker 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Natural patterns are often fractal.

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VeninVidiaVicii 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m pretty sure they mean perceptible complexity at the level of the human eye. Of course, everything has quarks and leptons in infinitely complex patterning.

	▲	meindnoch 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>I’m pretty sure they mean perceptible complexity at the level of the human eye That's precisely what they're wrong about. Take a look at tree branches. A field of grass. A stone cliff. Now take a look at human-made decor: drywall, plastic, laminated boards. Which one has more visual detail?

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Diogenesian 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, "shockingly" the LLM summary has it wrong. The paper is really focusing on luminance contrast: the variation in contrast within a natural object tends to be narrower than the variation between objects, and the neural metabolism of our visual system tends to be optimized towards a natural range of contrasts. Modern high-contrast decor and lighting is way out of natural balance, and for some people it can be exhausting.

"Visual complexity" is just wrong: simple black / hot pink stripes are visually exhausting upon immediate perception, whereas the monochromatically brown detail of a tree trunk is only visually exhausting on close inspection.

God, what a useless website. I hate LLMs. The actual paper is here: https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5150/10/2/34