The appearance and quality of objects are controlled by paint coatings on the surfaces of the objects. Recently, depth feeling in the appearance of paint coatings has attracted special attention. The depth feeling is a significantly discriminative sense that is judged by "color" and "depth" information. The information is studied as color appearance and flake appearance, in order to analyze perceptible factors in the depth feeling. The former is analyzed by a psychophysical method and computer simulation, considering the variation of color components such as hue, value, and chroma. The latter is analyzed by sensory evaluation with the paired comparison method and the hypothesis of a perspective model, considering the binocular disparity and the texture of flake pigments.

For color appearance, this study has revealed the availability of computer graphics technology and the effects of color components for depth feeling. For flake appearance, on the other hand, it has been revealed that the influence of the binocular disparity was negligible and that the depth was quantitatively evaluated according to two evaluation values obtained by analyzing the texture of the flake pigments, i.e. the variation of the area ratio considered by each pigment area and the difference between the maximum and minimum areas.