As just one example, there's really no laser-based measuring device in the world, even today, that can rapidly measure a surface near (<1mm) the edge of an object. Something that is trivial to do with ruby-ball touch sensors...
The laser scan is further from the truth of reality than vision as it has less information about reality captured & displayed.
Nitpick, but if we're talking about the world full of wavelengths, our brain gives us many ways to experience them!
I realize "thing" is doing a lot of work in the above sentence, and that everything is all just particles. Still, I think there's something to the idea that form and shape are more real than color.
FWIW the "solid" object you're observing is mostly space and the "you can't pass through a solid object" as far as we know is just a probability not a certainty.
The point is eyes are extracting more information from the image.
Visible light interactions with the object exists in reality and capturing that information brings the image closer to reality, not further. It tells you more about the cubes properties.
As an extreme example, you might have a space documentary start by showing an image with a few stars, saying "it seems quiet", then showing the same image with a bunch of colourful gasses visible, saying 'but the reality is beyond what our eyes can perceive, in infrared the image is full of detail'.
Reality, actual reality and not our perception of it, is made up of every detail, the more of that information you can capture the closer to reality the image.
Anyway my point was that our color perception is arbitrary. Its all just one fact, a lightwave/photon.
Why should we regard one extremely arbitrary way of sensing reality as more important or real than any of the others? Why is reflected light important, not absorbed light? Why visible spectrum vs other frequencies? Why human red/green/blue color cone detection (which is no such thing - they are overlapping curves of frequency spectrum sensitivity)? Why focus on light reflection, not sound? Why focus on surface attributes of objects such as "color" rather then regard other attributes such a mass distribution, or anything else as primary?
The trick comes in taking all that data from the hundreds of images generated by different-wavelength lasers and assembling them layer-by-layer into an image the human brain interprets as color, aka colorimetric rendering, onto the three-color-cone system the eye's retina employs plus a bunch of neural processing (there's a complex equation for this mapping of 'hyperspectral cube' data onto an RGB display for human visualization).
There's a really strange example - the mantis shrimp - that used to be thought to have rich color vision in a narrow band, but now people think it might be a lot more direct, a kind of color vision without much neural processing involved, with each photoreceptor scanning slighty different wavelengths and directly signalling to the mantis brain, such as it is:
Thoen et al. (2014) – "A different form of color vision in mantis shrimp" (Science)
The colors you see is what kind of light the matter reflects.
Both are real!
What I think the most important part is of your comment is how profound is to look at reality with a different lens. Be that a false color image like a laser scan, heatmap, space images, xray, microscope... it can be a really intense experience, just as you describe. Learning about the different filters (biases) that the brain puts on the stimuli is quite mind-boggling as well.
No, it is just yet another incomplete view of reality. For example, where are the infrared wavelengths in that scan? How can you say "that is reality" if it doesn't include that information? You might argue there are no true views of reality, that all views of reality are only some incomplete interpretation of it.
We see only some minimal set of what is necessary for us to see in order to survive with just enough certainty that we haven't gone extinct.
Anecdotally it's quite "magical" that nature ended up as 80% beautiful landscape (and sometimes the occasional horrendous sight) as if beauty is an emergent property of the biosphere..