This proceedings is a representation of decades of reasearch, teaching and application in the field. Image Processing, Fusion and Information Technology areas, Digital radio Communication, Wimax, Electrical engg, VLSI approach to processor design, embedded systems design are dealt in detail through models and illustrative techniques.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Entertainment Computing, ICEC 2014, held in Sydney, Australia, in October 2013. The 20 full papers, 6 short papers and 8 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submissions. In addition to these papers, the program featured 3 demonstration papers, and 2 workshops. The papers cover various aspects of entertainment computing including authoring, development, use and evaluation of digital entertainment artefacts and processes.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

The 3-volume set LNCS 8510, 8511 and 8512 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2014, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece in June 2014. The total of 1476 papers and 220 posters presented at the HCII 2014 conferences was carefully reviewed and selected from 4766 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers 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.

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.

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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."

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval, CMMR 2012, held in London, UK, in June 2012. The 28 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. The papers have been organized in the following topical sections: music emotion analysis; 3D audio and sound synthesis; computer models of music perception and cognition; music emotion recognition; music information retrieval; film soundtrack and music recommendation; and computational musicology and music education. The volume also includes selected papers from the Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Expressive Performance Workshop held within the framework of CMMR 2012.

This book constitutes the outcome of the Workshop on Measurement and Measurement Tools which was held as part of the Future Internet Research Experimentation (FIRE) initiative during the Future Internet Assembly conference (FIA) in May 2012. The 10 contributions included in this volume are invited extended versions of the presentations at the workshop. The book closes with a summary and conclusions of the findings in these papers.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Entertainment Computing, ICEC 2013, held in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in October 2013. The 13 full papers, 6 short papers, 11 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 submissions. In addition to these papers, the program featured 2 demos, 3 workshops, 3 tutorials and 3 art installations, also summarized in this book. The papers cover various topics in the multi-disciplinary field of entertainment computing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Haptic and Audio Interaction Design, HAID 2013, held in Daejeon, Korea, in April 2013.
The 14 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on non-intrusive and thermal haptics, new interfaces and interactions, emotion and affect, music, and mobile devices and applications.

Unity for Absolute Beginners walks you through the fundamentals of creating a small third-person shooter game with Unity. Using the free version of Unity to begin your game development career, you'll learn how to import, evaluate and manage your game resources to create awesome third-person shooters. This book assumes that you have little or no experience with game development, scripting, or 3D assets, and that you're eager to start creating games as quickly as possible, while learning Unity in a fun and interactive environment. With Unity for Absolute Beginners you'll become familiar with the Unity editor, key concepts and functionality. You'll learn how to import, evaluate and manage resources. You'll explore C# scripting in Unity, and learn how to use the Unity API. Using the provided art assets, you will learn the fundamentals of good game design and iterative refinement as you take your game from a simple prototype to a quirky, but challenging variation of the ever-popular first-person shooter. As can be expected, there will be plenty of destruction, special effects and mayhem along the way. Unity for Absolute Beginners assumes that you have little or no experience with game development, scripting, or 3D assets, but are eager to get up-to-speed as quickly as possible while learning Unity in a fun and interactive environment.

This volume contains the Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services (IIMSS-2011). IIMSS-2011 comes as a sequel to IIMSS-2008 (Piraeus-Athens, Greece, July 9, 10 and 11, 2008), IIMSS-2009 (Mogliano Veneto (near Venice), Italy, July 15, 16 and 17, 2009) and IIMSS-2010 (Baltimore, USA, July 28, 29, and 30, 2010). This fourth edition of the IIMSS Conference was organized jointly by the Department of Informatics of the University of Piraeus, Greece and the School of Electrical and Information Engineering of the University of South Australia, in conjunction with KES International. At a time when computers are more widespread than ever and computer users range from highly qualified scientists to non-computer-expert professionals and may include people with special needs, interactivity, personalization and adaptivity have become a necessity in modern multimedia systems. Modern intelligent multimedia systems need to be interactive not only through classical modes of interaction where the user inputs information through a keyboard or mouse. They must also support other modes of interaction, such as visual or lingual computer-user interfaces, which render them more attractive, user friendlier, more human-like and more informative. IIMSS is a new series of international scientific conferences aimed at presenting novel research in the fields of intelligent multimedia systems relevant to the development of a new generation of interactive, user-centric services.

Augmented and virtual reality are media innovations with specific characteristics. They create immersion in the user, as the user is immersed in the medium and its 360 Degrees environment. To successfully develop content and applications for AR and VR, psychological effects, the specifics of the 360 Degrees environment, the story, and the way the media is used must be aligned with the needs and experiences of the user. Content producers face novel challenges in content development, method selection, teamwork, and the overall production process of AR and VR experiences. The book introduces readers to the characteristics of immersive media and provides scientific evidence and practical tips to help them produce high-quality, user-centric content for immersive media. The scientifically derived success factors in the form of checklists are a guide and an ideal basis for standardizing the production process and further developing one's own projects.This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Medieninnovationen AR und VR by Elle Langer, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.

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.

This is the first part of the two-volume set (LNCS 8023-8024) that constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cross-Cultural Design, held as part of the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2013, held in Las Vegas, USA in July 2013, jointly with 12 other thematically similar conferences. The total of 1666 papers and 303 posters presented at the HCII 2013 conferences was carefully reviewed and selected from 5210 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation 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. This two-volume set contains 113 papers. The papers in this volume focus on the following topics: cross-cultural product design, cross-cultural design methods and techniques, international usability evaluation, and case studies in cross-cultural design.