Hypermedia and multimedia have penetrated the world of computer games, Internet, and CD-ROM based reference manuals. However, the fields of education, schooling, and training ask more specific benefits from them. This book provides practical approaches to transform these media into learning tools. Crucial helping steps include the migration from expository to exploratory learning strategies, the integration of collaborative learning practices in plenary and individualistic teaching styles, and the evolution from test-driven to experience-oriented training.
This volume has three goals:
* to discuss the concepts of hypermedia, multimedia, and hypertext and review pertinent research lines;
* to provide guidelines and suggestions for developing multimedia applications; and
* to place technology within a broader context of education and training through a discussion of rich environments for active learning (REALs).
The book takes a developmental focus to helpf readers set up and manage the process of developing a multimedia application. It is not a technical or a how-to manual on working with video, sound, digitized graphics, or computer code. The text takes a unique approach to the idea of media-- viewing media as delivery systems: if video is called for, use it; if sound will help in an application, use it. The fundamental guidelines presented here are usually "not" media specific. Media works only within the strategies with which they are used.
Aimed at practitioners--people who teach about or develop multimedia and hypermedia applications--this volume carefully examines the main components and issues in developing applications. It provides suggestions and heuristics for sound, fundamental design processes.

Due to the great success and enormous impact of IP networks, In ternet access (such as sending and receiving e-mails) and web brows ing have become the ruling paradigm for next generation wireless systems. On the other hand, great technological and commercial success of services and applications is being witnessed in mobile wire less communications with examples of cellular, pes voice telephony and wireless LANs. The service paradigm has thus shifted from the conventional voice service to seamlessly integrated high quality mul timedia transmission over broadband wireless mobile networks. The multimedia content may include data, voice, audio, image, video and so on. With availability of more powerful portable devices, such as PDA, portable computer and cellular phone, coupled with the easier access to the core network (using a mobile device), the number of mobile users and the demand for multimedia-based applications is increasing rapidly. As a result, there is an urgent need for a sys tem that supports heterogeneous multimedia services and provides seamless access to the desired resources via wireless connections. Therefore, the convergence of multimedia communication and wireless mobile networking technologies into the next generation wireless multimedia (WMM) networks with the vision of "anytime, anywhere, anyform" information system is the certain trend in the foreseeable future. However, successful combination of these two technologies presents many challenges such as available spectral bandwidth, energy efficiency, seamless end-to-end communication, robustness, security, etc."

Implicit definition and description of geometric objects and surfaces plays a critical role in the appearance and manipulation of computer graphics. In addition, the mathematical definition of shapes, using an implicit form, has pivotal applications for geometric modeling, visualization and animation. Until recently, the parametric form has been by far the most popular geometric representation used in computer graphics and computer-aided design. Whereas parametric objects and the techniques associated with them have been exhaustively developed, the implicit form has been used as a complementary geometric representation, mainly in the restricted context of specific applications. However, recent developments in graphics are changing this situation, and the community is beginning to draw its attention to implicit objects. This is reflected in the current research of aspects related to this subject. Employing a coherent conceptual framework, Implicit Objects in Computer Graphics addresses the role of implicitly defined objects in the following parts: mathematical foundations of geometric models, implicit formulations for the specification of shapes, implicit primitives, techniques for constructing and manipulating implicit objects, modeling, rendering and animation implicit objects. Topics and features: *Broad, conceptual approach covers the fundamental algorithms and ideas *Integrated and up-to-date overview of the main developments surrounding implicit objects *Organized and cohesive presentation combines theory and practice *Provides thorough explanation of key problems and challenges in the field

With the ever-increasing volume of data, proper management of data is a challenging proposition to scientists and researchers, and given the vast storage space required, multimedia data is no exception in this regard. Scientists and researchers are investing great effort to discover new space-efficient methods for storage and archiving of this data. Intelligent Innovations in Multimedia Data Engineering and Management provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of storage systems and computing methods for large forms of data. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as binary image, fuzzy logic, and metaheuristic algorithms, this book is ideally designed for computer engineers, IT professionals, technology developers, academicians, and researchers seeking current research on advancing strategies and computing techniques for various types of data.

In the past, rendering systems used a range of different approaches, each compatible and able to handle certain kinds of images. However, the last few years have seen the development of practical techniques, which bring together many areas of research into stable, production ready rendering tools. Written by experienced graphics software developers, Production Rendering: Design and Implementation provides not only a complete framework of different topics including shading engines and compilers, but discusses also the techniques used to implement feature film quality rendering engines.

Key Topics

??A Rendering framework for managing a micro polygon-oriented graphics pipeline

??Problems presented by different types of geometry showing how different surface types can be made ready for shading

??Shading and how it fits into a rendering pipeline

??How to write a good shader compiler

??Ray tracing in a production renderer

??Incorporating global illumination into a renderer

??Gathering surface samples into a final image

??Tips and tricks in rendering

About the authors

Mark Elendt, Senior Mathematician, has been with Side Effects Software Inc, Canada for 11 years and has written at least 5 renderers over these years. He was chief architect for the Houdini renderers Mantra and VMantra. In 1997 he received a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Rick LaMont, co-founder and CTO of Dot C Software, USA, currently acts as lead programmer of RenderDotC and Mai-Tai. He received the Computerworld Smithsonian Award for Technology Benefiting Mankind for his work on the WeyerhaeuserDesign Center (Foley and van Dam, Second Edition, color plate I.8).

Jacopo Pantaleoni, is currently a Developer for LightFlow Technologies, Italy, which he founded in 1999. His interests in mathematics, computer programming and, realistic rendering lead to the publication of Lightflow Rendering Tools. In 2000, he also began working with a team of beta testers, on a connection between his rendering software and MayaTM.

Scott Iverson, is the chief developer of the AIR renderer, and founder of Sitex Graphics Inc, USA

Paul Gregory, works for the Aqsis Team, UK. He is the originator, and lead developer of the open source renderer "Aqsis."

Matthew Bentham, is currently at ART VPS Ltd, UK. He is also the software developer responsible for compiler technology at ART VPS, creators of the RenderDrive rendering appliance.

Ian Stephenson, is a Senior Lecturer at the National Centre for Computer Animation (NCCA), Bournemouth University, UK. Developer of the Angel rendering system, he is also the author of Essential RenderMan Fast.

This volume describes the status of fractal imaging research and looks to future directions. It will be useful to researchers in the areas of fractal image compression, analysis, and synthesis, iterated function systems, and fractals in education. In particular it includes a vision for the future of these areas. It aims to provide an efficient means by which researchers can look back over the last decade at what has been achieved, and look forward towards second-generation fractal imaging. The articles in themselves are not meant to be detailed reviews or expositions, but to serve as signposts to the state of the art in their areas. What is important is what they mention and what tools and ideas are seen now to be relevant to the future. The contributors, a number of whom have been involved since the start, are active in fractal imaging, and provide a well-informed viewpoint on both the status and the future. Most were invited participants at a meeting on Fractals in Multimedia held at the IMA in January 2001. Some goals of the mini-symposium, shared with this volume, were to demonstrate that the fractal viewpoint leads to a broad collection of useful mathematical tools, common themes, new ways of looking at and thinking about existing algorithms and applications in multimedia, and to consider future developments. This book should be useful to commercial and university researchers in the rapidly evolving field of digital imaging, specifically, chief information officers, professors, software engineers, and graduate students in the mathematical sciences. While much of the content is quite technical, it contains pointers to the state-of-the-art and the future in fractal imaging.

Although GIS has been in existence for over 20 years, the systems have only recently matured to the point where they have become accessible to geographers, planners, environmental scientists and others as an affordable and practical tool for spatial analysis. Much of the GIS literature is scattered over the journals and technical reports of a number of disciplines. These sources are often not widely available especially to the newcomer to the field. This text was assembled to bring together what we believe is a balanced sampling of written works that cover important aspects of the basic principles involved in GIS, as well as to provide some examples of GIS applications.

For junior- to graduate-level courses in computer graphics. Assuming no background in computer graphics, this junior- to graduate-level textbook presents basic principles for the design, use, and understanding of computer graphics systems and applications. The authors, authorities in their field, offer an integrated approach to two-dimensional and three-dimensional graphics topics. A comprehensive explanation of the popular OpenGL programming package, along with C++ programming examples illustrates applications of the various functions in the OpenGL basic library and the related GLU and GLUT packages.

Intelligent multimedia surveillance concerns the analysis of multiple sensing inputs including video and audio streams, radio-frequency identification (RFID), and depth data. These data are processed for the automated detection and tracking of people, vehicles, and other objects. The goal is to locate moving targets, to understand their behavior, and to detect suspicious or abnormal activities for crime prevention. Despite its benefits, there is societal apprehension regarding the use of such technology, so an important challenge in this research area is to balance public safety and privacy.

This edited book presents recent findings in the field of intelligent multimedia surveillance emerging from disciplines such as multimedia computing, computer vision, and artificial intelligence. It consists of nine chapters addressing intelligent video surveillance, video analysis of crowds, privacy issues in intelligent multimedia surveillance, RFID technology for localization of objects, object tracking using visual saliency information, estimating multiresolution depth using active stereo vision, and performance evaluation for video surveillance systems.

The book will be of value to researchers and practitioners working on related problems in security, multimedia, and artificial intelligence."

Although synthetic environments were traditionally used in military settings for mission rehearsal and simulations, their use is rapidly spreading to a variety of applications in the commercial, research and industrial sectors, such as flight training for commercial aircraft, city planning, car safety research in real-time traffic simulations, and video games. 3D Synthetic Environment Reconstruction contains seven invited chapters from leading experts in the field, bringing together a coherent body of recent knowledge relating 3D geospatial data collection, design issues, and techniques used in synthetic environments design, implementation and interoperability. In particular, this book describes new techniques for the generation of Synthetic Environments with increased resolution and rich attribution, both essential for accurate modeling and simulation. This book also deals with interoperability of models and simulations, which is necessary for facilitating the reuse of modeling and simulation components. 3D Synthetic Environment Reconstruction is an excellent reference for researchers and practitioners in the field. Included with this volume is a CD-ROM containing the color version of the book's many illustrations.

This study surveys the approaches used and problems encountered in the modelling of real geophysical data. It addresses key themes of the modelling process including the selection of reliable data, the choice of data structure and the objective analysis of 3-D information presented in the model.

Welcome to the Second International IFIP Entertainment Computing Symposium on st Cultural Computing (ECS 2010), which was part of the 21 IFIP World Computer Congress, held in Brisbane, Australia during September 21-23, 2010. On behalf of the people who made this conference happen, we wish to welcome you to this inter- tional event. The IFIP World Computer Congress has offered an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to present their findings and research results in several prominent areas of computer science and engineering. In the last World Computer Congress, WCC 2008, held in Milan, Italy in September 2008, IFIP launched a new initiative focused on all the relevant issues concerning computing and entertainment. As a - sult, the two-day technical program of the First Entertainment Computing Symposium (ECS 2008) provided a forum to address, explore and exchange information on the state of the art of computer-based entertainment and allied technologies, their design and use, and their impact on society. Based on the success of ECS 2008, at this Second IFIP Entertainment Computing Symposium (ECS 2010), our challenge was to focus on a new area in entertainment computing: cultural computing.

Education and Technology for a Better World was the main theme for WCCE 2009. The conference highlights and explores different perspectives of this theme, covering all levels of formal education as well as informal learning and societal aspects of education. The conference was open to everyone involved in education and training. Additionally players from technological, societal, business and political fields outside education were invited to make relevant contributions within the theme: Education and Technology for a Better World. For several years the WCCE (World Conference on Computers in Education) has brought benefits to the fields of computer science and computers and education as well as to their communities. The contributions at WCCE include research projects and good practice presented in different formats from full papers to posters, demonstrations, panels, workshops and symposiums. The focus is not only on presentations of accepted contributions but also on discussions and input from all participants. The main goal of these conferences is to provide a forum for the discussion of ideas in all areas of computer science and human learning. They create a unique environment in which researchers and practitioners in the fields of computer science and human learning can interact, exchanging theories, experiments, techniques, applications and evaluations of initiatives supporting new developments that are potentially relevant for the development of these fields. They intend to serve as reference guidelines for the research community.

This volume presents the proceedings of ECSCW 2011, the 12th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Each conference offers an occasion to critically review our research field, which has been multidisciplinary and committed to high scientific standards, both theoretical and methodological, from its beginning. The papers this year focus on work and the enterprise as well as on the challenges of involving citizens, patients, etc. into collaborative settings. The papers embrace new theories, and discuss known ones. They contribute to the discussions on the blurring boundaries between home and work and on the ways we think about and study work. They introduce recent and emergent technologies, and study known social and collaborative technologies, such as wikis and video messages. Classical settings in computer supported cooperative work, e.g. meetings and standardization are also looked upon anew. With contributions from all over the world, the papers in interesting ways help focus on the European perspective in our community. The 22 papers selected for this conference deal with and reflect the lively debate currently ongoing in our field of research.

Digital fiction has long been perceived as an experimental niche of electronic literature. Yet born-digital narratives thrive in mainstream culture, as communities of practice create and share digital fiction, filling in the gaps between the media they are given and the stories they seek. Neverending Stories explores the influences of literature and computing on digital fiction and how the practices and cultures of each have impacted who makes and plays digital fiction. Popular creativity emerges from subordinated groups often excluded from producing cultural resources, accepting the materials of capitalism and inverting them for their own carnivalesque uses. Popular digital fiction goes by many different names: webnovels, adventure games, visual novels, Twitter fiction, webcomics, Twine games, walking sims, alternate reality games, virtual reality films, interactive movies, enhanced books, transmedia universes, and many more. The book establishes digital fiction in a foundation of innovation, tracing its emergence in various guises around the world. It examines Infocom, whose commercial success with interactive fiction crumbled, in no small part, because of its failure to consider women as creators or consumers. It takes note of the brief flourish of commercial book apps and literary games. It connects practices of cognitive and conceptual interactivity, and textual multiplicity-dating to the origins of the print novel-to the feminine. It pushes into the technological future of narrative in immersive and mixed realities. It posits the transmedia franchises and the practices of fanfiction as examples of digital fiction that will continue indefinitely, regardless of academic notice or approval.

Recent advances in computing, communication, and data storage have led to an increasing number of large digital libraries publicly available on the Internet. In addition to alphanumeric data, other modalities, including video play an important role in these libraries. Ordinary techniques will not retrieve required information from the enormous mass of data stored in digital video libraries. Instead of words, a video retrieval system deals with collections of video records. Therefore, the system is confronted with the problem of video understanding. The system gathers key information from a video in order to allow users to query semantics instead of raw video data or video features. Users expect tools that automatically understand and manipulate the video content in the same structured way as a traditional database manages numeric and textual data. Consequently, content-based search and retrieval of video data becomes a challenging and important problem.
This book focuses particularly on content-based video retrieval. After addressing basic concepts and techniques in the field, Content-Based Video Retrieval: A Database Perspective concentrates on the semantic gap problem, i.e., the problem of inferring semantics from raw video data, as the main problem of content-based video retrieval. This book identifies and proposes the integrated use of three different techniques to bridge the semantic gap, namely, spatio-temporal formalization methods, hidden Markov models, and dynamic Bayesian networks. As the problem is approached from a database perspective, the emphasis evolves from a database management system into a video database management system. This system allows a user to retrievethe desired video sequence among voluminous amounts of video data in an efficient and semantically meaningful way. This book also presents a modeling framework and a prototype of a content-based video management system that integrates the three methods and provides efficient, flexible, and scalable content-based video retrieval. The proposed approach is validated in the domain of sport videos for which some experimental results are presented.
Content-Based Video Retrieval: A Database Perspective is designed for a professional audience, composed of researchers and practitioners in industry. This book is also suitable as a secondary text for graduate-level students in computer science and electrical engineering.

Interactive Video-on-Demand Systems: Resource Management and Scheduling Strategies addresses issues in scheduling and management of resources in an interactive continuous-media (e.g., audio and video) server. The book emphasizes dynamic and run-time strategies for resource scheduling and management. Such strategies provide effective tools for supporting interactivity with on-line users who require the system to be responsive in serving their requests, and whose needs and actions vary frequently over time. With an emphasis on responsiveness and transient performance, this book elaborates on dynamic strategies for managing and scheduling resources in Video-on-Demand/Multimedia systems. Unlike previous books, this volume presents an unprecedented detailed analysis of the start-up and departure of streams. It gives a comprehensive evaluation of various techniques as workloads are varied in multiple dimensions (including arrival rate, data rate and length of play). Interactive Video-on-Demand Systems: Resource Management and Scheduling Strategies collectively addresses multiple issues including QoS, throughput, responsiveness and efficiency. The solutions discussed in this volume are particularly valuable to practitioners who are building digital library, interactive multimedia and hypermedia servers. Interactive Video-on-Demand Systems: Resource Management and Scheduling Strategies is an excellent reference for researchers, practitioners and educators in the field of multimedia systems, and may be used for advanced courses on multimedia systems and Video-on-Demand servers.

Multimedia computing has emerged in the last few years as a major area of research. Multimedia computer systems have opened a wide range of applications by combining a variety of information sources, such as voice, graphics, animation, images, audio, and full-motion video. Looking at the big picture, multimedia can be viewed as the merging of three industries: the computer, communications, and broadcasting industries. Research and development efforts in multimedia computing can be divided into two areas. As the first area of research, much effort has been centered on the stand-alone multimedia workstation and associated software systems and tools, such as music composition, computer-aided education and training, and interactive video. However, the combination of multimedia computing with distributed systems offers even greater potential. New applications based on distributed multimedia systems include multimedia information systems, collaborative and videoconferencing systems, on-demand multimedia services, and distance learning. Multimedia Tools and Applications is one of two volumes published by Kluwer, both of which provide a broad introduction to this fast moving area. This book covers selected tools applied in multimedia systems and key multimedia applications. Topics presented include multimedia application development techniques, techniques for content-based manipulation of image databases, techniques for selection and dissemination of digital video, and tools for digital video segmentation. Selected key applications described in the book include multimedia news services, multimedia courseware and training, interactive television systems, digital video libraries, multimedia messaging systems, and interactive multimedia publishing systems. The second book, Multimedia Systems and Techniques, covers fundamental concepts and techniques used in multimedia systems. The topics include multimedia objects and related models, multimedia compression techniques and standards, multimedia interfaces, multimedia storage techniques, multimedia communication and networking, multimedia synchronization techniques, multimedia information systems, scheduling in multimedia systems, and video indexing and retrieval techniques. Multimedia Tools and Applications, along with its companion volume, is intended for anyone involved in multimedia system design and applications and can be used as a textbook for advanced courses on multimedia.

"Mutative Media" is a sweeping examination of how communication technologies have contributed to changes in people s thoughts and actions, and thus in the power structures of societies, in the past, at present, and in four alternative futures.

We start by surveying what is generally known about the emergence of human language and speech that has enabled humans to extend their organizing abilities beyond that of other hominids. We then review research on the emergence of signs, symbols, and eventually writing, which led to new ways of thinking, acting, and organizing in scribal societies and vastly extended human influence globally. We consider the impact of the printing press in Europe, the Middle East, China, and Korea that led to various ways of thinking and organizing in modern societies, and conclude our historical survey with a discussion of the emergence and impact of electric and electronic communication technologies from the nineteenth century to the present.

After a brief overview of what futures studies is and is not, based on our extensive experience in the field, we present four generic alternative futures, and discuss a prototype of a hybrid, mixed-reality game designed to enable players to experience the power and potential of new communication technologies within four very different environments and conditions. We think you will be intrigued by our surprising findings and what they may mean for future generations "

This book presents high-quality research in the field of 3D imaging technology. The second edition of International Conference on 3D Imaging Technology (3DDIT-MSP&DL) continues the good traditions already established by the first 3DIT conference (IC3DIT2019) to provide a wide scientific forum for researchers, academia and practitioners to exchange newest ideas and recent achievements in all aspects of image processing and analysis, together with their contemporary applications. The conference proceedings are published in 2 volumes. The main topics of the papers comprise famous trends as: 3D image representation, 3D image technology, 3D images and graphics, and computing and 3D information technology. In these proceedings, special attention is paid at the 3D tensor image representation, the 3D content generation technologies, big data analysis, and also deep learning, artificial intelligence, the 3D image analysis and video understanding, the 3D virtual and augmented reality, and many related areas. The first volume contains papers in 3D image processing, transforms and technologies. The second volume is about computing and information technologies, computer images and graphics and related applications. The two volumes of the book cover a wide area of the aspects of the contemporary multidimensional imaging and the related future trends from data acquisition to real-world applications based on various techniques and theoretical approaches.

Continuous Media Databases brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Continuous Media Databases serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

Digital Libraries and Multimedia brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Digital Libraries and Multimedia serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

Building Flickr Applications with PHP teaches you how to use today's most popular online photo management system. You'll learn to work with both your own photos and Flickr's enormous cache, and create new and compelling extensions to the Flickr platform. This book is a great pick because It's written by experienced developer Rob Kunkle and Phlickr developer Andrew Morton. You'll learn how to use the PHP API Phlickr to write and retrieve photos. Flicker is growing quickly in popularity in the online photo management world. Using the popular PHP-driven Phlickr API in conjunction with MySQL, you'll discover how to take advantage of open source tools like PHP, Apache, and MySQL, as well as the Flickr architecture, to manage, retrieve, and format photos in imaginative ways. You'll also learn how to build upon Flickr's photo collaboration features to create interfaces for working with others on photo album projects. And you'll learn how to format Flickr tags--taking advantage of RSS to distribute photo updates.