*Planted: Nov 2024 | Last Tended: 20 March 2025* During my time at Meta in the Reality Labs Research group working on augmented reality experiences on prototype AR hardware, a large focus for RLR’s graphics and related technologies was photorealism: how can we render virtual content in AR and VR that is indistinguishable from real content?  As argued in [[🌿 Photorealism and Impressionism]] I believed this to be the wrong experiential goal, while the technical teams believed that it was the right goal from a technical standpoint: if we could truly achieve rendering content that was indistinguishable from reality, we could then scale back from there and find the experiential target. My argument was that that was a waste of effort when so much of what people actually want out of AR content requires so much less rendering effort. Why spend it trying to achieve photorealism when you could probably accomplish your goal going for 1/10th of that realism? Additionally, some experiences explicitly should not apply photorealism as a measure (See [[🌿 Photorealism and trust and safety issues]]).