Harmy said:
I don't know, have you seen Jurassic Park recently - the CGI in it has aged a lot - the T-Rex scenes still look great, because they are in low light and there's rain and stuff but that first Brontosaurus shot (the CGI model of which they tweaked and re-purposed for the SE's Ronto) looks ultra fake today, yet, in 1993, everyone thought that it looked totally real
If it looks ultra fake now it looked ultra fake then. Seeing reality is something that most everyone has done for most every day for their entire lives, so most everyone has a good frame of reference for comparison, and the wiring in the visual system and the parts of the brain which interpret visual information have not changed. However, it didn't actually look "ultra fake", then or now (link). Watch some Asylum movies to see some "ultra fake" looking CGI.
- the perception of what looks real on screen and what doesn't has always changed over time - when they first showed footage of a train coming towards the camera in the early days of cinema, people were ducking and running out of the way - and that was black-and-white, grainy, 2D projection, likely at 15fps.
That's something entirely different, assuming it ever really happened at all. For someone who has never seen motion picture of any kind, you could have an animation of a simple solid-colored black circle coming at the screen at high speed and you'd probably get reflexive reactions out of someone (and not because they are consciously thinking it is e.g. a real bowling ball headed toward them). And if it did happen, do you think it would happen upon an immediate second viewing with anyone? If you questioned people in theater after the show, and asked them, "Was there an actual physical train in the theater?" do you think any of them would say yes? Do you think that anyone of reasonable intelligence ever thought that cartoons were real people?