In European painting, a transition took place where artists started to consciously introduce blurred or soft contours in their works. There may have been several reasons for this. One suggestion in art historical literature is that this may have been done to create a stronger sense of volume in the depicted figures or objects. Here we describe four experiments in which we tried to test whether soft or blurred contours do indeed enhance a sense volume or depth. In the first three experiments, we found that, for both paintings and abstract shapes, three dimensionality was actually decreased instead of increased for blurred (and line) contours, in comparison with sharp contours. In the last experiment, we controlled for the position of the blur (on the lit or dark side) and found that blur on the lit side evoked a stronger impression of three dimensionality. Overall, the experiments robustly show that an art historical conjecture that a blurred contour increases three dimensionality is not granted. Because the blurred contours can be found in many established art works such as from Leonardo and Vermeer, there must be other rationales behind this use than the creation of a stronger sense of volume or depth.

Although product photos and movies are abundantly present in online shopping environments, little is known about how much of the real product experience they capture. While previous studies have shown that movies or interactive imagery give users the impression that these communication forms are more effective, there are no studies addressing this issue quantitatively. We used nine different samples of jeans, because in general fabrics represent a large and interesting product category and specifically because jeans can visually be rather similar while haptically be rather different. In the first experiment we let observers match a haptic stimulus to a visual representation and found that movies were more informative about how objects would feel than photos. In a second experiment we wanted to confirm this finding by using a different experimental paradigm that we deemed a better general paradigm for future studies on this topic: correlations of pairwise similarity ratings. However, the beneficial effect of the movies was absent when using this new paradigm. In the third experiment we investigated this issue by letting people visually observe other people in making haptic similarity judgments. Here, we did find a significant correlation between haptic and visual data. Together, the three experiments suggest that there is a small but significant effect of movies over photos (Experiment 1) but at the same time a significant difference between visual representations and visually perceiving products in reality (Experiments 2 and 3). This finding suggests a substantial theoretical potential for decreasing the gap between virtual and real product presentation.