This volume is the first book describing the new concept of "Mixed Reality" which is a kind of virtual reality in a broader sense. Published as the proceedings of the first International Symposium on Mixed Reality and written by an interdisciplinary group of experts from all over the world in both industry and academia, this book provides an in-depth look at the current state of mixed reality technology and the scope of its use in entertainment and interactive arts, as well as in engineering and medical applications. Because of the inherent interdisciplinary applications of the mixed reality technology, this book will be useful for computer scientists in computer graphics, computer vision, human computer interaction, and multimedia technologies, and for people involved in cinema/movie, architecture/civil engineering, medical informatics, and interactive entertainment.

This volume contains the lectures given in honor to Georg Farber as tribute to his contributions in the area of real-time and embedded systems. The chapters of many leading scientists cover a wide range of aspects, like robot or automotive vision systems or medical aspects. "

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Cross-Cultural Design, CCD 2014, held as part of the 16th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCI International 2014, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, jointly with 13 other thematically similar conferences. The total of 1476 papers and 220 posters presented at the HCII 2014 conferences was carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. They thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas. The 76 papers included in this volume deal with the following topics: cross-cultural product and service design; cross-cultural issues in interaction; social aspects and implications of cross-cultural design; cross-cultural issues in e-commerce, marketing and branding; cross-cultural design for knowledge sharing and learning; cross-cultural design for the smart city and cross-cultural design for creativity.

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 13th International Symposium, W2GIS 2014, held in Seoul, South Korea, in May 2014. The 12 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from numerous submissions. The program covers a wide range of topics including Communication and Parallel Processing for Geospatial Data, Geo-Social Net, Crowdsourcing, and Trajectory, Geo-Sensor Network, Applications of W2GIS, Indoor GIS.

This volume constitutes the refereed post-workshop proceedings of two IFIP WG 13.7 workshops on Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization: the 7th HCIV Workshop on Non-formal Modelling for Interaction Design, held at the 29th European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics, ECCE 2011, in Rostock, Germany, in August 2011 and the 8th HCIV Workshop on HCI and Visualization, held at the 13th IFIP TC 13 Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2011, in Lisbon, Portugal, in September 2011. The 15 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. They cover a wide range of topics in the fields of non-formal modeling, visualization and HCI and provide visions from researchers working at or across the borders between these domains that may help develop a holistic cross-discipline.

Focusing on the computer graphics required to create digital media this book discusses the concepts and provides hundreds of solved examples and unsolved problems for practice. Pseudo codes are included where appropriate but these coding examples do not rely on specific languages. The aim is to get readers to understand the ideas and how concepts and algorithms work, through practicing numeric examples.

Topics covered include:

2D Graphics

3D Solid Modelling

Mapping Techniques

Transformations in 2D and 3D Space

Illuminations, Lighting and Shading

Ideal as an upper level undergraduate text, "Digital Media A Problem-solving Approach for Computer Graphic, "approaches the field at a conceptual level thus no programming experience is required, just a basic knowledge of mathematics and linear algebra."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Serious Games for Training, Education, Health and Sports, Game Days 2014, held in Darmstadt, Germany, in April 2014. The 13 full papers presented together with 3 short papers, 2 keynotes, and 3 workshop papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book. The topics of the papers are settled in the fields of (game-based) training, teaching and learning, authoring tools, mobile gaming, health and rehabilitation, and citizen science. The papers address a broad scope of issues, including mechanisms and effects of (Serious) Games, adaptation and personalisation, local, mobile, and internet learning and education applications, game, reuse and evaluation, game settings, types of learners, problem solving etc.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 36th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2014, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in April 2014.

The 33 full papers, 50 poster papers and 15 demonstrations presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 288 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: evaluation, recommendation, optimization, semantics, aggregation, queries, mining social media, digital libraries, efficiency, and information retrieval theory. Also included are 3 tutorial and 4 workshop presentations.

As governments, citizens and organizations have moved online there is an increasing need for academic enquiry to adapt to this new context for communication and political action. This adaptation is crucially dependent on researchers being equipped with the necessary methodological tools to extract, analyze and visualize patterns of web activity. This volume profiles the latest techniques being employed by social scientists to collect and interpret data from some of the most popular social media applications, the political parties' own online activist spaces, and the wider system of hyperlinks that structure the inter-connections between these sites. Including contributions from a range of academic disciplines including Political Science, Media and Communication Studies, Economics, and Computer Science, this study showcases a new methodological approach that has been expressly designed to capture and analyze web data in the process of investigating substantive questions.

This book contains papers invited after the First International Workshop on Mobile Social Signal Processing, MSSP 2010, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in September 2010. The 9 revised papers included in this volume represent the diversity of two fields of research, Mobile HCI and Social Signal Processing and areas of overlap. They cover a wide range of topics spanning from approaches for effective interaction with mobile and wearable devices to modelling, analysis and synthesis of nonverbal behaviour in human-human and human-machine interactions.

This brief presents a peer-to-peer (P2P) web-hosting infrastructure (named pWeb) that can transform networked, home-entertainment devices into lightweight collaborating Web servers for persistently storing and serving multimedia and web content. The issues addressed include ensuring content availability, Plexus routing and indexing, naming schemes, web ID, collaborative web search, network architecture and content indexing. In pWeb, user-generated voluminous multimedia content is proactively uploaded to a nearby network location (preferably within the same LAN or at least, within the same ISP) and a structured P2P mechanism ensures Internet accessibility by tracking the original content and its replicas. This new paradigm of information management strives to provide low or no-cost cloud storage and entices the end users to upload voluminous multimedia content to the cloud data centers. However, it leads to difficulties in privacy, network architecture and content availability. Concise and practical, this brief examines the benefits and pitfalls of the pWeb web-hosting infrastructure. It is designed for professionals and practitioners working on P2P and web management and is also a useful resource for advanced-level students studying networks or multimedia.

The newest communication technologies are profoundly changing the world's politics, economies, and cultures, but the specific implications of online game worlds remain mysterious. "The Virtual Future" employs theories and methods from social science to explore nine very different virtual futures: "The Matrix Online," "Tabula Rasa," "Anarchy Online," "Entropia Universe," "Star Trek Online," "EVE Online, Star Wars Galaxies," "World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade," and "The Chronicles of Riddick."

Each presents a different picture of how technology and society could evolve in coming centuries, but one theme runs through all of them, the attempt to escape the Earth and seek new destinies among the stars. Four decades after the last trip to the moon, a new conception of spaceflight is emerging. Rather than rockets shooting humans across vast physical distances to sterile rocks that lack the resources to sustain life, perhaps robot space probes and orbiting telescopes will glean information about the universe, that humans can then experience inside computer-generated environments much closer to home.

All nine of these fantastically rich multiplayer masterpieces have shown myriads of people that really radical alternatives to contemporary society could exist, and has served as a laboratory for examining the consequences. Each is a prototype of new social forms, a utopian subculture, and a simulation of technologies that have yet to be invented. They draw upon several different traditions of science fiction and academic philosophy, and they were created in several nations. By comparing these nine role-playing fantasies, we can better consider what kind of world we want to inhabit in the real future."

The term "haptics" refers to the science of sensing and manipulation through touch. Multiple disciplines such as biomechanics, psychophysics, robotics, neuroscience, and software engineering converge to support haptics, and generally, haptic research is done by three communities: the robotics community, the human computer interface community, and the virtual reality community.

This book is different from any other book that has looked at haptics. The authors treat haptics as a new medium rather than just a domain within one of the above areas. They describe human haptic perception and interfaces and present fundamentals in haptic rendering and modeling in virtual environments. Diverse software architectures for standalone and networked haptic systems are explained, and the authors demonstrate the vast application spectrum of this emerging technology along with its accompanying trends. The primary objective is to provide a comprehensive overview and a practical understanding of haptic technologies. An appreciation of the close relationship between the wide range of disciplines that constitute a haptic system is a key principle towards being able to build successful collaborative haptic environments.

Structured as a reference to allow for fast accommodation of the issues concerned, this book is intended for researchers interested in studying touch and force feedback for use in technological multimedia systems in computer science, electrical engineering, or other related disciplines. With its novel approach, it paves the way for exploring research trends and challenges in such fields as interpersonal communication, games, or military applications.

This second volume of the "Handbook of Digital Homecare" reviews the attempts to develop new ICT services for digital homecare, i.e. services to deliver, maintain and improve care in the home environment using the latest ICT technology and devices. The book highlights the successful projects as well as failures of Digital homecare and provides several "lessons learned" to the wide audience of Health and ICT professionals.

This two-volume set of CCIS 391 and CCIS 392 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Information Computing and Applications, ICICA 2013, held in Singapore, in August 2013. The 126 revised full papers presented in both volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 665 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Internet computing and applications; engineering management and applications; intelligent computing and applications; control engineering and applications; cloud and evolutionary computing; knowledge management and applications; computational statistics and applications.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 14th Pacific-Rim Conference on Multimedia, PCM 2013, held in Nanjing, China, in December 2013. The 30 revised full papers and 27 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 153 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics in the area of multimedia content analysis, multimedia signal processing and communications and multimedia applications and services.

Soft computing, as opposed to conventional "hard" computing, tolerates imprecision and uncertainty, in a way very much similar to the human mind. Soft computing techniques include neural networks, evolutionary computation, fuzzy logic, and chaos. The recent years have witnessed tremendous success of these powerful methods in virtually all areas of science and technology, as evidenced by the large numbers of research results published in a variety of journals, conferences, as weil as many excellent books in this book series on Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing. This volume is dedicated to recent novel applications of soft computing in communications. The book is organized in four Parts, i.e., (1) neural networks, (2) evolutionary computation, (3) fuzzy logic and neurofuzzy systems, and (4) kernel methods. Artificial neural networks consist of simple processing elements called neurons, which are connected by weights that may be adjusted during learning. Part 1 of the book has seven chapters, demonstrating some of the capabilities of two major types of neural networks, i.e., multiplayer perceptron (MLP) neural networks and Hopfield-type neural networks.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment, INTETAIN 2013. The 23 full papers presented were carefully selected from numerous submissions. The conference aims at enhancing the understanding of recent and anticipated advances in interactive technologies, and their applications to entertainment, education, culture, and the arts. The papers are grouped in topical sections on linked media, gaming technologies, and technologies for live entertainment.

Machine learning builds models of the world using training data from the application domain and prior knowledge about the problem. The models are later applied to future data in order to estimate the current state of the world. An implied assumption is that the future is stochastically similar to the past. The approach fails when the system encounters situations that are not anticipated from the past experience. In contrast, successful natural organisms identify new unanticipated stimuli and situations and frequently generate appropriate responses.

The observation described above lead to the initiation of the DIRAC EC project in 2006. In 2010 a workshop was held, aimed to bring together researchers and students from different disciplines in order to present and discuss new approaches for identifying and reacting to unexpected events in information-rich environments. This book includes a summary of the achievements of the DIRAC project in chapter 1, and a collection of the papers presented in this workshop in the remaining parts."

When the new medium of CD-ROMs emerged, industry figures and critics alike proclaimed their virtually unlimited potential. Adapting material from well-established media like television and film, CD-ROMs have quickly transformed genres such as science fiction and horror. At the same time, the realities of actual CD-ROMs often fall short of their utopian visions.

On a Silver Platter marks a "coming of age" for CD-ROMs as a commercially and aesthetically significant medium demanding critical attention. Greg Smith brings together media scholars such as Lisa Cartwright, Henry Jenkins, Janet Murray, and Scott Bukatman to analyze how CD-ROMs offer alternatives to familiar places--to museums, to cities, and especially to classrooms. Examining specific CD-ROM titles, including, Sim City, Civilization, and Phantasmagoria, the contributors argue that CD-ROMs are complex texts worthy of close consideration, both for how they have changed our understanding of space and genre, and for how they will impact the development of future media.

By examining particular CD-ROM texts and contexts, On a Silver Platter probes this new medium for insight and understanding into the current state of multimedia and into the future of technology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Interactive Storytelling, ICIDS 2013, Istanbul, Turkey, November 2013. The 14 revised full papers presented together with 10 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 51 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on theory and aesthetics; authoring tools and applications; evaluation and user experience reports; virtual characters and agents; new storytelling modes; workshops.

Alias|Wavefront's Maya 3D animation software is an integrated collection of tools for creating computer generated images, used in nearly every blockbuster special effects film that has been released in the last few years. The first choice for digital content creators, Maya combines animation, dynamics, modelling and rendering tools, enabling you to create digital characters and visual effects for live action films or stand-alone animation.

This book is an extensive treatise on the most up-to-date advances in computer graphics technology and its applications. Both in business and industrial areas as well as in research and development, you will see in this book an incredible devel opment of new methods and tools for computer graphics. They play essential roles in enhancing the productivity and quality of human work through computer graph ics and applications. Extensive coverage of the diverse world of computer graphics is the privilege of this book, which is the Proceedings of InterGraphics '83. This was a truly interna tional computer graphics conference and exhibit, held in Tokyo, April 11-14, 1983, sponsored by the World Computer Grpphics Association (WCGA) and organized by the Japan Management Association (JMA) in coopera'tion' with *~CM-SIGGRAPH. InterGraphics has over 15 thousands participants. This book consists of seven Chapters. The first two chapters are on the basics of computer graphics, and the remaining five chapters are dedicated to typical appli cation areas of computer graphics. Chapter 1 contains four papers on "graphics techniques". Techniques to generate jag free images, to simulate digital logic, to display free surfaces and to interact with 3 dimensional (3D) shaded graphics are presented. Chapter 2 covers "graphics standards and 3D models" in five papers. Two papers discuss the CORE standard and the GKS standard. Three papers de scribe various 3D models and their evaluations.

Contains everything that a project team needs to know about the development and deployment of Web services with the IBM WebSphere product family. Included will be examples for all development artifacts in a format that can be reused in the reader s project. It combines the authors own practical experiences with consolidated information on the latest product capabilities in a unique approach that allows the book to be easily accessible to a broad spectrum of readers. Finding a balance between a euphoric/optimistic and down-to earth/realistic view on the subject, this book will be an essential part of every Web service developer s bookshelf.

"

This book on multimedia tools for communicating mathematics arose from presentations at an international workshop organized by the Centro de Matematica e Aplicacoes Fundamentais at the University of Lisbon, in November 2000, with the collaboration of the Sonderforschungsbereich 288 at the University of Technology in Berlin, and of the Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. The MTCM2000 meeting aimed at the scientific methods and algorithms at work inside multimedia tools, and it provided an overview of the range of present multimedia projects, of their limitations and the underlying mathematical problems.
This book presents some of the tools and algorithms currently being used to create new ways of making enhanced interactive presentations and multimedia courses. It is an invaluable and up-to-date reference book on multimedia tools presently available for mathematics and related subjects."