Contributors to the aesthetic judgement of 3D virtual sculptures

Aesthetic judgement plays a key role in many aspects of everyday life, judging an object to be aesthetically pleasing often heightens the pleasure and enjoyment derived from that object. One area where this applies is artwork, where most genres and styles of art heavily rely on being considered aesthetically pleasing. It has been shown that an aesthetic judgement of a piece of art combines many different aspects, all contributing to the assessment. Identifying and understanding these aspects for 2D images has been extensively investigated, however, 3D items have not been considered to the same degree. In this paper, we investigate which aspects contribute to the aesthetic judgement of 3D virtual sculptures, using a gamified approach within a custom VR environment. Participants were able to express which aspects contributed to their assessment of the virtual sculptures. We found that some stalwart 2D aspects, such as complexity and order, are not as highly important for 3D items, being replaced by other characteristics such as how dynamic the sculpture appeared.