Comics: An Introduction provides a clear and detailed introduction to the Comics form - including graphic narratives and a range of other genres - explaining key terms, history, theories, and major themes. The book uses a variety of examples to show the rich history as well as the current cultural relevance and significance of Comics. Taking a broadly global approach, Harriet Earle discusses the history and development of the form internationally, as well as how to navigate comics as a new way of reading. Earle also pushes beyond the book to lay out the ways that fans engage with their comics of choice - and how this can impact the industry. She also analyses how Comics can work for social change and political comment. Discussing journalism and life writing, she examines how the coming together of word and image gives us new ways to discuss our world and ourselves. A glossary and further reading section help those new to Comics solidify their understanding and further their exploration of this dynamic and growing field.

Games as Texts provides an overview and practical steps for analysing games in terms of their representations of social structures, class, power, race, sexuality, gender, animals, nature, and ability. Each chapter applies a traditional literary theory to the narrative and mechanics of games and explores the social commentary the games encourage. This approach demonstrates to players, researchers, games media, and non-gamers how they can engage with these cultural artefacts through both critical reading and theoretical interpretations. Key Features: Explores games through various literary and theoretical lenses Provides exemplar analysis and guiding questions to help readers think critically about games Highlights the social commentary that all texts can reveal-including games-and how this impacts narrative and mechanics

This book offers the first comprehensive study of the many interfaces shaping the relationship between comics and videogames. It combines in-depth conceptual reflection with a rich selection of paradigmatic case studies from contemporary media culture. The editors have gathered a distinguished group of international scholars working at the interstices of comics studies and game studies to explore two interrelated areas of inquiry: The first part of the book focuses on hybrid medialities and experimental aesthetics "between" comics and videogames; the second part zooms in on how comics and videogames function as transmedia expansions within an increasingly convergent and participatory media culture. The individual chapters address synergies and intersections between comics and videogames via a diverse set of case studies ranging from independent and experimental projects via popular franchises from the corporate worlds of DC and Marvel to the more playful forms of media mix prominent in Japan. Offering an innovative intervention into a number of salient issues in current media culture, Comics and Videogames will be of interest to scholars and students of comics studies, game studies, popular culture studies, transmedia studies, and visual culture studies.

This book presents concisely the full story on complex and hypercomplex fractals, starting from the very first steps in complex dynamics and resulting complex fractal sets, through the generalizations of Julia and Mandelbrot sets on a complex plane and the Holy Grail of the fractal geometry - a 3D Mandelbrot set, and ending with hypercomplex, multicomplex and multihypercomplex fractal sets which are still under consideration of scientists. I tried to write this book in a possibly simple way in order to make it understandable to most people whose math knowledge covers the fundamentals of complex numbers only. Moreover, the book is full of illustrations of generated fractals and stories concerned with great mathematicians, number spaces and related fractals. In the most cases only information required for proper understanding of a nature of a given vector space or a construction of a given fractal set is provided, nevertheless a more advanced reader may treat this book as a fundamental compendium on hypercomplex fractals with references to purely scientific issues like dynamics and stability of hypercomplex systems.

Ranging from blockbuster movies to experimental shorts or documentaries to scientific research, computer animation shapes a great part of media communication processes today. Be it the portrayal of emotional characters in moving films or the creation of controllable emotional stimuli in scientific contexts, computer animation's characteristic artificiality makes it ideal for various areas connected to the emotional: with the ability to move beyond the constraints of the empirical "real world," animation allows for an immense freedom. This book looks at international film productions using animation techniques to display and/or to elicit emotions, with a special attention to the aesthetics, characters and stories of these films, and to the challenges and benefits of using computer techniques for these purposes.

Both pragmatic and motivational, this book addresses what it means to have a successful long-term career in the arts, taking stock of the current landscape of the art world, introducing new venues in the field, reflecting on issues of social media and exhibition, and ultimately encouraging artists to take control of their professional lives. Weaving conversations from a range of internationally based artists who have negotiated alternative paths to success, lauded artist and teacher Stacy Miller provides a practical, lively reflection on what it takes to be an artist in our new global landscape. This book covers practical needs, different approaches, and philosophical ways of creating a life and career in the arts. It lays out conventional and nonconventional means to representation, describes being an entrepreneur versus funding independent creative projects, and examines social media for the potential powerhouse it is. Most importantly, it gives artists a way to think about being a professional and the different paths to a successful career in the arts. Perfect for emerging, mid-career, and experienced artists, this book encourages readers to redefine personal success and to act locally, nationally, and internationally in an expanding art world.

This volume comprises six well-versed contributed chapters devoted to report the latest fi ndings on the applications of machine learning for big data analytics. Big data is a term for data sets that are so large or complex that traditional data processing application software is inadequate to deal with them. The possible challenges in this direction include capture, storage, analysis, data curation, search, sharing, transfer, visualization, querying, updating and information privacy. Big data analytics is the process of examining large and varied data sets - i.e., big data - to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations, market trends, customer preferences and other useful information that can help organizations make more-informed business decisions. This volume is intended to be used as a reference by undergraduate and post graduate students of the disciplines of computer science, electronics and telecommunication, information science and electrical engineering. THE SERIES: FRONTIERS IN COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE The series Frontiers In Computational Intelligence is envisioned to provide comprehensive coverage and understanding of cutting edge research in computational intelligence. It intends to augment the scholarly discourse on all topics relating to the advances in artifi cial life and machine learning in the form of metaheuristics, approximate reasoning, and robotics. Latest research fi ndings are coupled with applications to varied domains of engineering and computer sciences. This field is steadily growing especially with the advent of novel machine learning algorithms being applied to different domains of engineering and technology. The series brings together leading researchers that intend to continue to advance the fi eld and create a broad knowledge about the most recent research.

The book addresses the problem of accuracy of spatial databases, and comprises of papers drawn from a wide range of physical and human systems, taking approaches which vary from statistical to descriptive. Together they present both a comprehensive review of existing knowledge, techniques and experience, and an analysis of critical research needs in this area of spatial data handling.

COLLADA, the digital entertainment industry's first standard interchange format for 3D graphics, defines an XML-based schema to enable 3D authoring applications to freely exchange digital assets without loss of information - enabling multiple software packages to be combined into extremely powerful tool chains. It was developed in a cooperative effort between the industry's leading developers of applications, games, and platforms to streamline the interchange process. This book, written by the two driving forces behind COLLADA, is a complete guide to the COLLADA 1.4 specification. It provides content developers, application developers, and tool providers with a unique insight into the design of COLLADA that will help them to: exchange and fully preserve asset data; package programmable shader effects; control real-time physics engines; and build powerful content creation pipelines that can automatically condition and scale 3D geometry and texture assets for real-time playback on a wide diversity of platforms. tool vendors and game developers and has been adopted as an official industry standard by the Khronos Group.

This book lays out all the latest research in the area of multimedia data hiding. The book introduces multimedia signal processing and information hiding techniques. It includes multimedia representation, digital watermarking fundamentals and requirements of watermarking. It moves on to cover the recent advances in multimedia signal processing, before presenting information hiding techniques including steganography, secret sharing and watermarking. The final part of this book includes practical applications of intelligent multimedia signal processing and data hiding systems.

This book presents selected papers from the Sixteenth International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing, in conjunction with the Thirteenth International Conference on Frontiers of Information Technology, Applications and Tools, held on November 5-7, 2020, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It is divided into two volumes and discusses the latest research outcomes in the field of Information Technology (IT) including information hiding, multimedia signal processing, big data, data mining, bioinformatics, database, industrial and Internet of things, and their applications.

Data structures and tools from computational geometry help to solve problems in computer graphics; these methods have been widely adopted by the computer graphics community yielding elegant and efficient algorithms. This book focuses on algorithms and data structures that have proven to be versatile, efficient, fundamental, and easy to implement. The book familiarizes students, as well as practitioners in the field of computer graphics, with a wide range of data structures. The authors describe each data structure in detail, highlight fundamental properties, and present algorithms based on the data structure. A number of recent representative and useful algorithms from computer graphics are described in detail, illuminating the utilization of the data structure in a creative way.

In his third book on the semiotics of title sequences, Title Sequences as Paratexts, theorist Michael Betancourt offers an analysis of the relationship between the title sequence and its primary text-the narrative whose production the titles credit. Using a wealth of examples drawn from across film history-ranging from White Zombie (1931), Citizen Kane (1940) and Bullitt (1968) to Prince of Darkness (1987), Mission: Impossible (1996), Sucker Punch (2011) and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2017)-Betancourt develops an understanding of how the audience interprets title sequences as instances of paranarrative, simultaneously engaging them as both narrative exposition and as credits for the production. This theory of cinematic paratexts, while focused on the title sequence, has application to trailers, commercials, and other media as well.

Mobile devices' impact on daily life has raised relevant questions regarding public and private space and communication. Both the technological environment (operating systems, platforms, apps) and media ecosystems (interface design, participatory culture, social media) influence how users deal with the public and private, intimate and personal spheres. Leading researchers in communication, art, computer engineering, education, law, sociology, philosophy, and psychology here explore current methodologies for studying the dichotomy of the public and private in mobile communication, providing a foundation for further research.

The book is inspired by the second seminar in a cycle connected to the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the Politecnico di Milano. "Working with the Image Description Processing Prediction" was the motto of this meeting, aiming to point out the role of Visual Language not only in describing reality, but also in supporting the thinking processes in Science (prediction), in Art (invention), in Technical studies (prevision) and in identifying and working on both visible and invisible phenomena. As John Barrow states, "So often a picture is better than a thousand words" and "The visual language is the most natural, while the other language could reasonably be considered as 'postscripts' to the human story." The essays included in the volume (from lectures, the poster session, interviews and round table) will show the wide range of technical possibilities connected with the present use of the Image, especially thanks to Computer Graphics, from 3D Modeling to Augmented Reality, while also offering a glimpse of interesting theoretical perspectives. In the end, as noted by Martin Heidegger, the word "theory" not only comes from the Ancient Greek verb "theoreo," that is "to see, to observe," but it also echoes the words "theos" and "thea," namely "god" and "goddess," and above all, it shares the root with the term "aletheia," which is the "truth," which is not far from the ultimate goal of research.

Together with its compagnion volume this book presents a practical introduction to computing spline functions, the fundamental tools for fitting curves and surfaces in computer-aided design (CAD) and computer graphics.

These volumes present a practical introduction to computing spline functions, the fundamental tools for fitting curves and surfaces in computer-aided deisgn (CAD) and computer graphics.

This book presents 3D3C platforms - three-dimensional systems for community, creation and commerce. It discusses tools including bots in social networks, team creativity, privacy, and virtual currencies & micropayments as well as their applications in areas like healthcare, energy, collaboration, and art. More than 20 authors from 10 countries share their experiences, research fi ndings and perspectives, off ering a comprehensive resource on the emerging fi eld of 3D3C worlds. The book is designed for both the novice and the expert as a way to unleash the emerging opportunities in 3D3C worlds. This Handbook maps with breadth and insight the exciting frontier of building virtual worlds with digital technologies. David Perkins, Research Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education This book is from one of the most adventurous and energetic persons I have ever met. Yesha takes us into new undiscovered spaces and provides insight into phenomena of social interaction and immersive experiences that transform our lives. Cees de Bont, Dean of School of Design & Chair Professor of Design, School of Design of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University When you read 3D3C Platforms you realize what a domain like ours -- 3D printing -- can and should do for the world. Clearly we are just starting. Inspiring.David Reis, CEO, Stratasys Ltd This book provides a stunning overview regarding how virtual worlds are reshaping possibilities for identity and community. Th e range of topics addressed by the authors- from privacy and taxation to fashion and health care-provide a powerful roadmap for addressing the emerging potential of these online environments. Tom Boellstorff , Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine Handbook on 3D3C Platforms amassed a unique collection of multidisciplinary academic thinking. A primer on innovations that will touch every aspect of the human community in the 21st century. Eli Talmor, Professor, London Business School

This book presents an overview of the state of the art in video coding technology. Specifically, it introduces the tools of the AVS2 standard, describing how AVS2 can help to achieve a significant improvement in coding efficiency for future video networks and applications by incorporating smarter coding tools such as scene video coding. Features: introduces the basic concepts in video coding, and presents a short history of video coding technology and standards; reviews the coding framework, main coding tools, and syntax structure of AVS2; describes the key technologies used in the AVS2 standard, including prediction coding, transform coding, entropy coding, and loop-filters; examines efficient tools for scene video coding and surveillance video, and the details of a promising intelligent video coding system; discusses optimization technologies in video coding systems; provides a review of image, video, and 3D content quality assessment algorithms; surveys the hot research topics in video compression.

This book argues for the importance of sketching as a mode of thinking, and the relevance of sketching in the design process, design education, and design practice. Through a wide range of analysis and discussion, the book looks at the history of sketching as a resource throughout the design process and asks questions such as: where does sketching come from? When did sketching become something different to drawing and how did that happen? What does sketching look like in the present day? Alongside an in-depth case study of students, teachers, and practitioners, this book includes a fascinating range of interviews with designers from a wide variety of backgrounds, including fashion, user experience, and architecture. Sketching as Design Thinking explains how drawing and sketching remain a prominent aspect in our learning and creative process, and provides a rich resource for students of visual art and design.

The ubiquity of computer-generated imagery around us, in movies, advertising or on the Internet is already being taken for granted and what impresses most people is the photorealistic quality of the images. Pictures, as we have often been told, are worth a thousand words and the information transported by an image can take many different forms. Many computer graphics researchers are exploring non-photorealistic rendering techniques as an alternative to realistic rendering. Defined by what it is not, non-photorealistic rendering brings art and science together, concentrating less on the process and more on the communication content of an image. Techniques that have long been used by artists can be applied to computer graphics to emphasize subtle attributes and to omit extraneous information. This book provides an overview of the published research on non-photorealistic rendering in order to categorize and distill the current research into a body of usable techniques. A summary of some of the algorithms as well as pseudo-code for producing some of the images is included.

Operators are introducing mobile television and digital video content services globally. The Handbook of Mobile Broadcasting addresses all aspects of these services, providing a comprehensive reference on DVB-H, DMB, ISDB-T, and MediaFLO. Featuring contributions from experts in the field, the text presents technical standards and distribution protocols, offering detailed coverage of video coding, including design methodology and error resilience techniques; state-of-the-art technologies such as signaling, optimization, implementation, and simulation; and applications of mobile broadcasting, including emerging areas and new interactive services.

This book brings together a number of researchers and developers from industry and academia who report on their work. It is of interest to language designers and the creators of toolkits, UIMSs, and other user interface tools.

Written by researchers who have helped found and shape the field, this book is a definitive introduction to geometric modeling. The authors present all of the necessary techniques for curve and surface representations in computer-aided modeling with a focus on how the techniques are used in design. They achieve a balance between mathematical rigor and broad applicability. Appropriate for readers with a moderate degree of mathematical maturity, this book is suitable as an undergraduate or graduate text, or particularly as a resource for self-study.