Novel display devices and fabrication techniques enable highly tangible ways of creating, experiencing, and interacting with digital content. The capabilities offered by these new output devices, such as virtual and augmented reality head-mounted displays and new multi-material 3D printers, make them real game-changers in many fields. At the same time, the new possibilities offered by these devices impose many challenges for content creation techniques regarding quality and computational efficiency. This paper discusses the concept of perception-aware optimizations, which incorporate insights from human perception into computational methods to optimize content according to the capabilities of different output devices, e.g., displays, 3D printers, and requirements of the human sensory system. As demonstrated in this paper, the key advantage of such strategies is that tailoring computation to perceptually-relevant aspects of the content often reduces the computational cost related to the content creation or overcomes certain limitations of output devices. Besides discussing the general concept, the paper presents several specific applications where perception-aware optimization has been proven beneficial. The examples include methods for optimizing visual content for novel display devices that focus on perceived quality and new computational fabrication techniques for manufacturing objects that look and feel like real ones.