The combination of your comment and the parent article reminded me of when I was first getting involved in VR/AR research in grad school, and realized that I had inadvertently started perceiving the quality of rendering in VR as a "good enough" approximation of the real world. Simple geometry, lighting, ambient occlusion, bump/displacement maps, etc. I realized I had to get myself out of the lab and into reality again to really observe all the minute details that we just can't capture at this point in VR (even ignoring all the senses besides sight). It's easy to fall into the tempting trap of letting your mental models and abstractions become how you perceive things.