Contextual Design: Design for Life, Second Edition, describes the core techniques needed to deliberately produce a compelling user experience. Contextual design was first invented in 1988 to drive a deep understanding of the user into the design process. It has been used in a wide variety of industries and taught in universities all over the world. Until now, the basic CD approach has needed little revision, but with the wide adoption of handheld devices, especially smartphones, the way technology is integrated into people's lives has fundamentally changed. Contextual Design V2.0 introduces both the classic CD techniques and the new techniques needed to "design for life", fulfilling core human motives while supporting activities. This completely updated and revised edition is written in a clear, informal style without excessive jargon, and is the must-have book for any UX Design library. Users will find coverage of mobile devices and consumer and business products, all illustrated with new examples, case studies, and discussions on how to use CD with the agile development and other project requirements methods.

Non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) is a combination of computer graphics and computer vision that produces renderings in various artistic, expressive or stylized ways such as painting and drawing. This book focuses on image and video based NPR, where the input is a 2D photograph or a video rather than a 3D model. 2D NPR techniques have application in areas as diverse as consumer and professional digital photography and visual effects for TV and film production. The book covers the full range of the state of the art of NPR with every chapter authored by internationally renowned experts in the field, covering both classical and contemporary techniques. It will enable both graduate students in computer graphics, computer vision or image processing and professional developers alike to quickly become familiar with contemporary techniques, enabling them to apply 2D NPR algorithms in their own projects.

The overall aim of the book is to introduce students to the typical course followed by a data analysis project in earth sciences. A project usually involves searching relevant literature, reviewing and ranking published books and journal articles, extracting relevant information from the literature in the form of text, data, or graphs, searching and processing the relevant original data using MATLAB, and compiling and presenting the results as posters, abstracts, and oral presentations using graphics design software. The text of this book includes numerous examples on the use of internet resources, on the visualization of data with MATLAB, and on preparing scientific presentations. As with its sister book MATLAB Recipes for Earth Sciences-3rd Edition (2010), which demonstrates the use of statistical and numerical methods on earth science data, this book uses state-of-the art software packages, including MATLAB and the Adobe Creative Suite, to process and present geoscientific information collected during the course of an earth science project. The book's supplementary electronic material (available online through the publisher's website) includes color versions of all figures, recipes with all the MATLAB commands featured in the book, the example data, exported MATLAB graphics, and screenshots of the most important steps involved in processing the graphics.

Radar scattering and imaging of rough surfaces is an active interdisciplinary area of research with many practical applications in fields such as mineral and resource exploration, ocean and physical oceanography, military and national defense, planetary exploration, city planning and land use, environmental science, and many more. By focusing on the most advanced analytical and numerical modeling and describing both forward and inverse modeling, Radar Scattering and Imaging of Rough Surfaces: Modeling and Applications with MATLAB (R) connects the scattering process to imaging techniques by vivid examples through numerical and experimental demonstrations and provides computer codes and practical uses. This book is unique in its simultaneous treatment of radar scattering and imaging. Key Features Bridges physical modeling with simulation for resolving radar imaging problems (the first comprehensive work to do so) Provides excellent basic and advanced information for microwave remote-sensing professionals in various fields of science and engineering Covers most advanced analytical and numerical modeling for both backscattering and bistatic scattering Includes MATLAB (R) codes useful not only for academics but also for radar engineers and scientists to develop tools applicable in different areas of earth studies Covering both the theoretical and the practical, Radar Scattering and Imaging of Rough Surfaces: Modeling and Applications with MATLAB (R) is an invaluable resource for professionals and students using remote sensing to study and explain the Earth and its processes. University and research institutes, electrical and radar engineers, remote-sensing image users, application software developers, students, and academics alike will benefit from this book. The author, Kun-Shan Chen, is an internationally known and respected engineer and scientist and an expert in the field of electromagnetic modeling.

Build your VFX arsenal with quick-access, step-by-step instruction on how to create today's hottest digital VFX shots. This essential toolkit provides techniques for creating effects seen in movies such as 300, Spiderman 3, Predator and others, with lessons on how-to: * splatter blood or digitally lop someone's arm off * create a scene with actors running from an explosion * create the "twin effect" (same actor, same location, 2 performances) * produce space-ship dog fights Organized in a 'cookbook' style, this allows you to reference a certain effect in the index and immediately access concise instructions to create that effect. Techniques are demonstrated in each of the most popular software tools- After Effects, Final Cut Studio, Photoshop, and Combustion are all covered. Brilliant, 4-color presentation provides inspiration and stimulating visual guidance to the lessons presented, while the downloadable resources contain project media files enabling you to put concepts learned into immediate practice.

This book takes a hemispheric approach to contemporary urban intervention, examining urban ecologies, communication technologies, and cultural practices in the twenty-first century. It argues that governmental and social regimes of control and forms of political resistance converge in speculation on disaster and that this convergence has formed a vision of urban environments in the Americas in which forms of play and imaginations of catastrophe intersect in the vertical field. Schifani explores a diverse range of resistant urban interventions, imagining the city as on the verge of or enmeshed in catastrophe. She also presents a model of ecocriticism that addresses aesthetic practices and forms of play in the urban environment. Tracing the historical roots of such tactics as well as mapping their hopes for the future will help the reader to locate the impacts of climate change not only on the physical space of the city, but also on the epistemological and aesthetic strategies that cities can help to engender. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Urban Studies, Media Studies, American Studies, Global Studies, and the broad and interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities.

Locating Imagination in Popular Culture offers a multi-disciplinary account of the ways in which popular culture, tourism and notions of place intertwine in an environment characterized by ongoing processes of globalization, digitization and an increasingly ubiquitous nature of multi-media. Centred around the concept of imagination, the authors demonstrate how popular culture and media are becoming increasingly important in the ways in which places and localities are imagined, and how they also subsequently stimulate a desire to visit the actual places in which people's favourite stories are set. With examples drawn from around the globe, the book offers a unique study of the role of narratives conveyed through media in stimulating and reflecting desire in tourism. This book will have appeal in a wide variety of academic disciplines, ranging from media and cultural studies to fan- and tourism studies, cultural geography, literary studies and cultural sociology.

This book offers a full history of a homeless movement in Tokyo that lasted nearly a decade. It shows how homeless people and their external supporters in the city combined their scarce resources to generate and sustain the movement. The study advocates a more nuanced analysis of movement gains to appreciate how poor people can benefit by acting collectively. It also draws attention to potential difficulties faced by lower-stratum movements aided by external allies. In particular, the study highlights how actions of the state can undermine the relations between aggrieved allies in such a way as to limit gains. The book is the first in English to detail homeless mobilization in Japan. It also addresses the origins of increased homelessness and development of homelessness policy in the country. Besides homelessness, it covers a number of current social issues, including economic globalization, social exclusion, and politics over space.

The book presents papers delivered by researchers, industrial experts and academicians at the Conference on Emerging Trends in Computing and Communication (ETCC 2014). As such, the book is a collection of recent and innovative works in the field Network Security and Cryptography, Cloud Computing and Big Data Analytics, Data Mining and Data Warehouse, Communication and Nanotechnology and VLSI and Image Processing.

Andrew Rapo and Alex Michael explain all the important programming concepts from a designer's point of view, making them completely accessible to non-programmers. Completely revised and rewritten this second edition will help you develop professional ActionScript 2 applications, and communicate knowledgably about current, Object Oriented ActionScript 2 techniques.
Divided into four sections to take you from novice to professional results:
* Flash Fundamentals: Introduces the Flash authoring environment and basic core Flash concepts.
* ActionScript 2 Fundamentals: Explains basic programming concepts and terminology, and shows how ActionScript 2 classes are constructed and used.
* Built-in Classes: Describes the built-in ActionScript classes that are available for use in applications, including the MovieClip class, Key class, Sound class, etc.
* Using ActionScript to Build a Game: Describes the development process for creating a complex Flash application and presents commercial-quality game coding examples.
- Benefit from explanations and examples of why and how ActionScript can simplify Flash production and expand your design potential
- Learn all the basics of strong scripting skills to produce professional results
- Example code is available and ready to use with either Flash MX 2004 or Flash 8 - at www.rapo.org/as2book

The Definitive Vulkan (TM) Developer's Guide and Reference: Master the Next-Generation Specification for Cross-Platform Graphics The next generation of the OpenGL specification, Vulkan, has been redesigned from the ground up, giving applications direct control over GPU acceleration for unprecedented performance and predictability. Vulkan (TM) Programming Guide is the essential, authoritative reference to this new standard for experienced graphics programmers in all Vulkan environments. Vulkan API lead Graham Sellers (with contributions from language lead John Kessenich) presents example-rich introductions to the portable Vulkan API and the new SPIR-V shading language. The author introduces Vulkan, its goals, and the key concepts framing its API, and presents a complex rendering system that demonstrates both Vulkan's uniqueness and its exceptional power. You'll find authoritative coverage of topics ranging from drawing to memory, and threading to compute shaders. The author especially shows how to handle tasks such as synchronization, scheduling, and memory management that are now the developer's responsibility. Vulkan (TM) Programming Guide introduces powerful 3D development techniques for fields ranging from video games to medical imaging, and state-of-the-art approaches to solving challenging scientific compute problems. Whether you're upgrading from OpenGL or moving to open-standard graphics APIs for the first time, this guide will help you get the results and performance you're looking for. Coverage includes Extensively tested code examples to demonstrate Vulkan's capabilities and show how it differs from OpenGL Expert guidance on getting started and working with Vulkan's new memory system Thorough discussion of queues, commands, moving data, and presentation Full explanations of the SPIR-V binary shading language and compute/graphics pipelines Detailed discussions of drawing commands, geometry and fragment processing, synchronization primitives, and reading Vulkan data into applications A complete case study application: deferred rendering using complex multi-pass architecture and multiple processing queues Appendixes presenting Vulkan functions and SPIR-V opcodes, as well as a complete Vulkan glossary

The hand is quicker than the eye. In many cases, so is digital video. Maintaining image quality in bandwidth- and memory-restricted environments is quickly becoming a reality as thriving research delves ever deeper into perceptual coding techniques, which discard superfluous data that humans cannot process or detect. Surveying the topic from a Human Visual System (HVS)-based approach, Digital Video Image Quality and Perceptual Coding outlines the principles, metrics, and standards associated with perceptual coding, as well as the latest techniques and applications. This book is divided broadly into three parts. First, it introduces the fundamental theory, concepts, principles, and techniques underlying the field, such as the basics of compression, HVS modeling, and coding artifacts associated with current well-known techniques. The next section focuses on picture quality assessment criteria; subjective and objective methods and metrics, including vision model based digital video impairment metrics; testing procedures; and international standards regarding image quality. Finally, practical applications come into focus, including digital image and video coder designs based on the HVS as well as post-filtering, restoration, error correction, and concealment techniques. The permeation of digital images and video throughout the world cannot be understated. Nor can the importance of preserving quality while using minimal storage space, and Digital Video Image Quality and Perceptual Coding provides the tools necessary to accomplish this goal. Instructors and lecturers wishing to make use of this work as a textbook can download a presentation of 786 slides in PDF format organized to augment thetext. accompany our book (H.R. Wu and K.R. Rao, Digital Video Image Quality and Perceptual Coding, CRC Press (ISBN: 0-8247-2777-0), Nov. 2005) for lecturers or instructor to use for their classes if they use the book.

Important elements of games, movies, and other computer-generated content, shadows are crucial for enhancing realism and providing important visual cues. In recent years, there have been notable improvements in visual quality and speed, making high-quality realistic real-time shadows a reachable goal. Real-Time Shadows is a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of real-time shadow techniques. It covers a large variety of different effects, including hard, soft, volumetric, and semi-transparent shadows. The book explains the basics as well as many advanced aspects related to the domain of shadow computation. It presents interactive solutions and practical details on shadow computation. The authors compare various algorithms for creating real-time shadows and illustrate how they are used in different situations. They explore the limitations and failure cases, advantages and disadvantages, and suitability of the algorithms in several applications. Source code, videos, tutorials, and more are available on the book's website www.realtimeshadows.com.

Based on course notes of SIGGRAPH course teaching techniques for real-time rendering of volumetric data and effects; covers both applications in scientific visualization and real-time rendering. Starts with the basics (texture-based ray casting) and then improves and expands the algorithms incrementally. Book includes source code, algorithms, diagrams, and rendered graphics.

The fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn Adobe Photoshop Elements 2021 Classroom in a Book (R), the best-selling series of hands-on software training workbooks, offers what no other book or training program does -- an official training series from Adobe, developed with the support of Adobe product experts. Adobe Photoshop Elements 2021 Classroom in a Book contains 10 lessons that cover the basics and beyond, providing countless tips and techniques to help you become more productive with the program. You can follow the book from start to finish or choose only those lessons that interest you. Purchasing this book includes valuable online extras. Follow the instructions in the book's "Getting Started" section to unlock access to: Downloadable lesson files you need to work through the projects in the book Web Edition containing the complete text of the book What you need to use this book: Adobe Photoshop Elements 2021 software, for either Windows or macOS. (Software not included.) Note: Classroom in a Book does not replace the documentation, support, updates, or any other benefits of being a registered owner of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2021 software.

Spreadin' Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters,1880-1930 is a classic work on a little-studied subject in American music history: the contribution of African-American songwriters to the world of popular song. Hailed by Publishers Weekly as "thoroughly researched and entertainingly written," this work documents the careers of songwriters like James A. Bland ("Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny"), Bert Williams ("Nobody"), W. C. Handy ("St. Louis Blues"), Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake ("I'm Just Wild About Harry"), and many more. Richly illustrated with rare photographs from sheet music, newspapers, and other unique sources, the book documents an entire era of performance when black singers, dancers, and actors were active on the New York stage. In sheer depth of research, new information, and full coverage, Spreadin' Rhythm Around offers a comprehensive picture of the contributions of black musicians to American popular song. For anyone interested in the history of jazz, pop song, or Broadway, this book will be a revelation.

Software programs are complex, the books that explain them shouldn t be. This thoroughly illustrated, full-color guide explains everything you need to know to get up and running quickly with Combustion. Get a jump-start learning the major features or the software without bogging you down with unnecessary detail.
The author shares his professional insight and extensive training experience to ensure you'll get the most out of all the professional paint, animation, editing and 3D compositing tools Combustion offers. Also featured are many workflow tips which show how to tap into the full power of Combustion 4 in your effects and motion graphics work.
For useful tips and tutorials, visit the book's companion site at www.elsevierdirect.com/companions/9780240520100
* Unique, fast introduction to Combustion 4, but relevant to all versions
* Concise color coverage, written by an experienced professional and trainer
* Ideal for professionals, new users and those migrating to Combustion from other compositing or effects packages
* Companion site with useful tips and tutorials can be found at http: //www.elsevierdirect.com/companions/9780240520100

An In-Depth, Practical Guide to GPGPU Programming Using Direct3D 11 GPGPU Programming for Games and Science demonstrates how to achieve the following requirements to tackle practical problems in computer science and software engineering: Robustness Accuracy Speed Quality source code that is easily maintained, reusable, and readable The book primarily addresses programming on a graphics processing unit (GPU) while covering some material also relevant to programming on a central processing unit (CPU). It discusses many concepts of general purpose GPU (GPGPU) programming and presents practical examples in game programming and scientific programming. The author first describes numerical issues that arise when computing with floating-point arithmetic, including making trade-offs among robustness, accuracy, and speed. He then shows how single instruction multiple data (SIMD) extensions work on CPUs since GPUs also use SIMD. The core of the book focuses on the GPU from the perspective of Direct3D 11 (D3D11) and the High Level Shading Language (HLSL). This chapter covers drawing 3D objects; vertex, geometry, pixel, and compute shaders; input and output resources for shaders; copying data between CPU and GPU; configuring two or more GPUs to act as one; and IEEE floating-point support on a GPU. The book goes on to explore practical matters of programming a GPU, including code sharing among applications and performing basic tasks on the GPU. Focusing on mathematics, it next discusses vector and matrix algebra, rotations and quaternions, and coordinate systems. The final chapter gives several sample GPGPU applications on relatively advanced topics. Web ResourceAvailable on a supporting website, the author's fully featured Geometric Tools Engine for computing and graphics saves you from having to write a large amount of infrastructure code necessary for even the simplest of applications involving shader programming. The engine provides robust and accurate source code with SIMD when appropriate and GPU versions of algorithms when possible.

This book provides a deep understanding of state-of-art methods for simulation of heterogeneous crowds in computer graphics. It will cover different aspects that are necessary to achieve plausible crowd behaviors. The book will be a review of the most recent literature in this field that can help professionals and graduate students interested in this field to get up to date with the latest contributions, and open problems for their possible future research. The chapter contributors are well known researchers and practitioners in the field and they include their latest contributions in the different topics required to achieve believable heterogeneous crowd simulation. Provides crowd simulation methodology to populate virtual environments, for video games or any kind of applications that requires believable multi-agent behavior Presents the latest contributions on crowd simulation, animation, planning, rendering and evaluation with detailed algorithms for implementation purposes Includes perspectives of both academic researchers and industrial practitioners with reference to open source solutions and commercial applications, where appropriate

Driven by consumer-market applications that enjoy steadily increasing economic importance, graphics hardware and rendering algorithms are a central focus of computer graphics research. Video-based rendering is an approach that aims to overcome the current bottleneck in the time-consuming modeling process and has applications in areas such as computer games, special effects, and interactive TV. This book offers an in-depth introduction to video-based rendering, a rapidly developing new interdisciplinary topic employing techniques from computer graphics, computer vision, and telecommunication engineering. Providing an overview of the state-of-the-art of video-based rendering and details of the fundamental VBR algorithms, the author discusses the advantages, the potential, as well as the limitations of the approach in the context of different application scenarios.

This book explains how to use the symbolic differentiation system D* for applications in computer games and engineering simulation. The authors describe how to create procedural 3D geometric models, link them together to form multibody physical systems, and simulate and display their physical behavior in real time. The symbolic differentiation capabilities of D* can be used in a wide variety of technical applications, including computer graphics, engineering, and mechanical simulation. Two Lagrangian physics simulation and procedural 3D geometric modeling are developed in great detail.

Architecture for the Commons dives into an analysis of how the tectonics of a building is fundamentally linked to the economic organizations that allow them to exist. By tracing the origins and promises of current technological practices in design, the book provides an alternative path, one that reconsiders the means of achieving complexity through combinatorial strategies. This move requires reconsidering serial production with crowdsourcing and user content in mind. The ideas presented will be explored through the design research developed within Plethora Project, a design practice that explores the use of video game interfaces as a mechanism for participation and user design. The research work presented throughout the book seeks to align with a larger project that is currently taking place in many different fields: The Construction of the Commons. By developing both the ideological and physical infrastructure, the project of the Commons has become an antidote to current economic practices that perpetuate inequality. The mechanisms of the production and governance of the Commons are discussed, inviting the reader to get involved and participate in the discussion. The current political and economic landscape calls for a reformulation of our current economic practices and alternative value systems that challenge the current market monopolies. This book will be of great interest not only to architects and designers studying the impact of digital technologies in the field of design but also to researchers studying novel techniques for social participation and cooperating of communities through digital networks. The book connects principles of architecture, economics and social sciences to provide alternatives to the current production trends.

Introduction to Visual Computing: Core Concepts in Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing covers the fundamental concepts of visual computing. Whereas past books have treated these concepts within the context of specific fields such as computer graphics, computer vision or image processing, this book offers a unified view of these core concepts, thereby providing a unified treatment of computational and mathematical methods for creating, capturing, analyzing and manipulating visual data (e.g. 2D images, 3D models). Fundamentals covered in the book include convolution, Fourier transform, filters, geometric transformations, epipolar geometry, 3D reconstruction, color and the image synthesis pipeline. The book is organized in four parts. The first part provides an exposure to different kinds of visual data (e.g. 2D images, videos and 3D geometry) and the core mathematical techniques that are required for their processing (e.g. interpolation and linear regression.) The second part of the book on Image Based Visual Computing deals with several fundamental techniques to process 2D images (e.g. convolution, spectral analysis and feature detection) and corresponds to the low level retinal image processing that happens in the eye in the human visual system pathway. The next part of the book on Geometric Visual Computing deals with the fundamental techniques used to combine the geometric information from multiple eyes creating a 3D interpretation of the object and world around us (e.g. transformations, projective and epipolar geometry, and 3D reconstruction). This corresponds to the higher level processing that happens in the brain combining information from both the eyes thereby helping us to navigate through the 3D world around us. The last two parts of the book cover Radiometric Visual Computing and Visual Content Synthesis. These parts focus on the fundamental techniques for processing information arising from the interaction of light with objects around us, as well as the fundamentals of creating virtual computer generated worlds that mimic all the processing presented in the prior sections. The book is written for a 16 week long semester course and can be used for both undergraduate and graduate teaching, as well as a reference for professionals.

Architecture for the Commons dives into an analysis of how the tectonics of a building is fundamentally linked to the economic organizations that allow them to exist. By tracing the origins and promises of current technological practices in design, the book provides an alternative path, one that reconsiders the means of achieving complexity through combinatorial strategies. This move requires reconsidering serial production with crowdsourcing and user content in mind. The ideas presented will be explored through the design research developed within Plethora Project, a design practice that explores the use of video game interfaces as a mechanism for participation and user design. The research work presented throughout the book seeks to align with a larger project that is currently taking place in many different fields: The Construction of the Commons. By developing both the ideological and physical infrastructure, the project of the Commons has become an antidote to current economic practices that perpetuate inequality. The mechanisms of the production and governance of the Commons are discussed, inviting the reader to get involved and participate in the discussion. The current political and economic landscape calls for a reformulation of our current economic practices and alternative value systems that challenge the current market monopolies. This book will be of great interest not only to architects and designers studying the impact of digital technologies in the field of design but also to researchers studying novel techniques for social participation and cooperating of communities through digital networks. The book connects principles of architecture, economics and social sciences to provide alternatives to the current production trends.

The book consists of 29 extended chapters which have been selected and invited from the submissions to the "1st International Conference on Computer Science, Applied Mathematics and Applications" (ICCSAMA 2013) held on 9-10 May, 2013 in Warsaw, Poland. The book is organized into five parts, which are: Advanced Optimization Methods and Their Applications, Queuing Theory and Applications, Computational Methods for Knowledge Engineering, Knowledge Engineering with Cloud and Grid Computing, and Logic Based Methods for Decision Making and Data Mining, respectively. All chapters in the book discuss theoretical and practical issues connected with computational methods and optimization methods for knowledge engineering.