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 examines the life of the Australian artist Harry Reade (1927-1998) and his largely overlooked contribution to animation. It constitutes a biography of Reade, tracing his life from his birth to his period of involvement with animation between 1956 and 1969. It explores the forces that shaped Reade and chronicles his experiences as a child, his early working life, the influence of left-wing ideology on his creative development, his introduction to animation through the small but radical Waterside Workers' Federation Film Unit (WWFFU), and the influence he had on the development of Cuban animation as an educational tool of the Revolution. Key Features The text offers an alternative framework for considering the political, social, and cultural themes that characterised 1950s Australia and 1960s Cuba. A rare look into the cultural heritage of labor organizations and the populist power of animation to stimulate radical social consciousness. The book also crosses a range of intellectual disciplines, including Animation Studies, Art History, Cinema Studies, and the Social and Political Histories of Australia and Cuba. Max Bannah lives on Queensland's Sunshine Coast. Between 1976 and 2010, he worked in Brisbane as an animator producing television commercials, short films, and cartoon graphics. He also lectured in Animation History and Practice and Drawing for Animation at the Queensland University of Technology where, in 2007, he completed his Masters by Research thesis, "A Cause for Animation: Harry Reade and the Cuban Revolution."

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.

Mathematical and Computer Programming Techniques for Computer Graphics introduces the mathematics and related computer programming techniques used in Computer Graphics. Starting with the underlying mathematical ideas, it gradually leads the reader to a sufficient understanding of the detail to be able to implement libraries and programs for 2D and 3D graphics. Using lots of code examples, the reader is encouraged to explore and experiment with data and computer programs (in the C programming language) and to master the related mathematical techniques.

A simple but effective set of routines are included, organised as a library, covering both 2D and 3D graphics taking a parallel approach to mathematical theory, and showing the reader how to incorporate it into example programs. This approach both demystifies the mathematics and demonstrates its relevance to 2D and 3D computer graphics."

Get Real-World Insight from Experienced Professionals in the OpenGL CommunityWith OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and WebGL, real-time rendering is becoming available everywhere, from AAA games to mobile phones to web pages. Assembling contributions from experienced developers, vendors, researchers, and educators, OpenGL Insights presents real-world techniques for intermediate and advanced OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and WebGL developers. Go Beyond the BasicsThe book thoroughly covers a range of topics, including OpenGL 4.2 and recent extensions. It explains how to optimize for mobile devices, explores the design of WebGL libraries, and discusses OpenGL in the classroom. The contributors also examine asynchronous buffer and texture transfers, performance state tracking, and programmable vertex pulling. Sharpen Your SkillsFocusing on current and emerging techniques for the OpenGL family of APIs, this book demonstrates the breadth and depth of OpenGL. Readers will gain practical skills to solve problems related to performance, rendering, profiling, framework design, and more.

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.

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.

In the extensive fields of optics, holography and virtual reality, technology continues to evolve. Displays: Fundamentals and Applications, Second Edition addresses these updates and discusses how real-time computer graphics and vision enable the application and displays of graphical 2D and 3D content. This book explores in detail these technological developments, as well as the shifting techniques behind projection displays, projector-camera systems, stereoscopic and autostereoscopic displays. This new edition contains many updates and additions reflecting the changes in fast developing areas such as holography and near-eye displays for Augmented and Virtual reality applications. Perfect for the student looking to sharpen their developing skill or the master refining their technique, Rolf Hainich and Oliver Bimber help the reader understand the basics of optics, light modulation, visual perception, display technologies, and computer-generated holography. With almost 500 illustrations Displays will help the reader see the field of augmentation and virtual reality display with new eyes. Features: * Covers physics, technology and techniques behind flat-panel as well as projection displays, projector-camera systems, stereoscopic and autostereoscopic displays, computer-generated holography, and near-eye displays * Discusses how real-time computer graphics and computer vision enable the visualization of graphical 2D and 3D content * Augmented by close to 500 rich illustrations, which give readers a clear understanding of existing and emerging display technology

Interviewing is a foundational user research tool that people assume they already possess. Everyone can ask questions, right? Unfortunately, that's not the case. Interviewing Users provides invaluable interviewing techniques and tools that enable you to conduct informative interviews with anyone. You'll move from simply gathering data to uncovering powerful insights about people.

Learn how to paint on your iPad like the professionals in Beginner's Guide to Procreate, a comprehensive introduction to this industry-standard software. Accessible and versatile, Procreate is an ideal tool for anyone wanting to give digital painting a go. Step-by-step tutorials, quick tips, and inspiring artwork ensure you'll have all you need to create stunning concept art quickly and easily.

The aims of these proceedings are to provide a complete coverage of the areas outlined, and to bring together researchers from academic and industry to share ideas, challenges, and solutions relating to the multifaceted aspects of this field. New multimedia standards (for example, MPEG-21) facilitate the seamless integration of multiple modalities into interoperable multimedia frameworks, transforming the way people work and interact with multimedia data. These key technologies and multimedia solutions interact and collaborate with each other in increasingly effective ways, contributing to the multimedia revolution and having a significant impact across a wide spectrum of consumer, business, healthcare, education, and governmental domains.

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.

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.

This volume comprises eight well-versed contributed chapters devoted to report the latest findings on the intelligent approaches to multimedia data analysis. Multimedia data is a combination of different discrete and continuous content forms like text, audio, images, videos, animations and interactional data. At least a single continuous media in the transmitted information generates multimedia information. Due to these different types of varieties, multimedia data present varied degrees of uncertainties and imprecision, which cannot be easy to deal by the conventional computing paradigm. Soft computing technologies are quite efficient to handle the imprecision and uncertainty of the multimedia data and they are flexible enough to process the real-world information. Proper analysis of multimedia data finds wide applications in medical diagnosis, video surveillance, text annotation etc. 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 state of the art.

The aim of this book is to examine the geometry of our world and, by blending theory with a variety of every-day examples, to stimulate the imagination of the readers and develop their geometric intuition. It tries to recapture the excitement that surrounded geometry during the Renaissance as the development of perspective drawing gathered pace, or more recently as engineers sought to show that all the world was a machine. The same excitement is here still, as enquiring minds today puzzle over a random-dot stereogram or the interpretation of an image painstakingly transmitted from Jupiter.The book will give a solid foundation for a variety of undergraduate courses, to provide a basis for a geometric component of graduate teacher training, and to provide background for those who work in computer graphics and scene analysis. It begins with a self-contained development of the geometry of extended Euclidean space. This framework is then used to systematically clarify and develop the art of perspective drawing and its converse discipline of scene analysis and to analyze the behavior of bar-and-joint mechanisms and hinged-panel mechanisms. Spherical polyhedra are introduced and scene analysis is applied to drawings of these and associated objects. The book concludes by showing how a natural relaxation of the axioms developed in the early chapters leads to the concept of a matroid and briefly examines some of the attractive properties of these natural structures.

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.

The Geometry Toolbox takes a novel and particularly visual approach to teaching the basic concepts of two- and three-dimensional geometry. It explains the geometry essential for today's computer modeling, computer graphics, and animation systems. While the basic theory is completely covered, the emphasis of the book is not on abstract proofs but rather on examples and algorithms. The Geometry Toolbox is the ideal text for professionals who want to get acquainted with the latest geometric tools. The chapters on basic curves and surfaces form an ideal stepping stone into the world of graphics and modeling. It is also a unique textbook for a modern introduction to linear algebra and matrix theory.

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.

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.

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 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.