Numerical simulations of global warming, Mars observation data, and aircraft design are but a few of the topics where the use of human visual perception for data understanding are considered essential. Ten years agoa handful of pioneers professed the value of visualization to skeptical audiences. Today, with supercomputers and sensors producing ever-increasing amounts of data, scientific visualization is accepted throughout much of science and engineering as the fundamental tool for data analysis. Written by a world-wide panel of visualization experts, Scientific Visualization: Advances and Challenges presents astute coverage of prevailing trends, issues, and practice of scientific visualization. From algorithmic topics such as volume graphics and the modeling and visualization of large data sets, to foundations, perception, and interface technology (including virtual reality), this book provides the latest advances in the area. The book demonstrates new techniques, examines diverse application areas, and discusses current limitations and upcoming requirements. Scientific Visualization:Advances and Challenges $&gt; presents readers with a unique opportunity to examine expert thinking and current practice, and to obtain a vision of potential future directions. It will be essential reading for scientific and engineering practitioners and visualization researchers alike. Offers extremely topical and timely coverage of a rapidly evolving area Includes contributions from an international panel of visualization experts in one accessible volume Provides scientific and engineering practitioners as well as visualization researchers with an essential guide to the literature

Frontiers in Scientific Visualization: Advances and Challenges

Computers & Technology

Earnshaw, Rae

Thalmann, Daniel

Rosenblum, L.

Encarnacao, J.

Hagen, H.

Klimenko, S.

Nielson, G.

Post, F.

Web Development & Design

Academic Press

The technology which once produced the first synthetic human today includes the simulation of human behaviour processes, associated with consciousness and the emotions. When a computer creates artificial life, its synthetic creatures demonstrate the behaviour patterns of real living beings. This book investigates the technological advances which allow artificial life to be placed within a virtual setting, where the human user can meet and interact with synthetic beings?people, animals or plants?in a complete simulation of the real world. It introduces new concepts such as artificial consciousness, artificial presence, artificial autonomy and artificial perception; and discusses important results in the development of immersive and auditory virtual environments, and co-operative work.

Artificial Life and Virtual Reality

Magnenat-Thalmann, Nadia

Computer Science

wiley

Avatars in Networked Virtual Environments Tolga K. Çapin Computer Graphics Lab, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland Igor S. Pandzic MIRALab, University of Geneva, Switzerland Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann MIRALab, University of Geneva, Switzerland Daniel Thalmann Computer Graphics Lab, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland Telepresence is the future of multimedia systems and will allow participants to share professional and private experiences, meetings, games and parties. Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs) are systems that allow distant users to interact in a common Virtual Environment. One of the areas of research in NVEs is the user representation or 'avatar', the way that participants are geographically represented in Virtual Environments. * Examines solutions to the Virtual Life Network (VLNET) system, a flexible framework for Virtual Humans in NVEs * Presents different means of facial communication, gesture and non-verbal communication * Provides details for solving all problems of handling Virtual Human data across the network * Analyses the potential relation of the future MPEG-4 standard to NVEs * Discusses the standardisation of Virtual Humans in VRML * Includes applications such as a Virtual tennis game and studies the experimental results and achievements. Essential reading for a wide-ranging audience including computer scientists, engineers in communication systems, undergraduate and postgraduate students of computer science, and researchers in computer animation, visualisation and communications technology.

Avatars in Networked Virtual Environments

Pandzic, Igor S.

Çapin, Tolga K.

Games & Strategy Guides

John Wiley&Sons, Inc.

Research into the methods and techniques used in simulating crowds has developed extensively within the last few years, particularly in the areas of video games and film. Despite recent impressive results when simulating and rendering thousands of individuals, many challenges still exist in this area.The comparison of simulation with reality, the realistic appearance of virtual humans and their behavior, group structure and their motion, and collision avoidance are just some examples of these challenges. For most of the applications of crowds, it is now a requirement to have real-time simulations – which is an additional challenge, particularly when crowds are very large.Crowd Simulation analyses these challenges in depth and suggests many possible solutions. Daniel Thalmann and Soraia Musse share their experiences and expertise in the application of: ·         Population modeling·         Virtual human animation·         Behavioral models for crowds·         The connection between virtual and real crowds·         Path planning and navigation·         Visual attention models·         Geometric and populated semantic environments·         Crowd renderingThe second edition presents techniques and methods developed since the authors first covered the simulation of crowds in 2007. Crowd Simulation includes in-depth discussions on the techniques of path planning, including a new hybrid approach between navigation graphs and potential-based methods. The importance of gaze attention – individuals appearing conscious of their environment and of others – is introduced, and a free-of-collision method for crowds is also discussed.

Crowd Simulation

Musse, Soraia Raupp

Springer

Stepping into Virtual Reality

Gutiérrez A., Mario A.

Vexo, Frédéric

Modula-2: An Introduction

Programming

This book presents the making of computer-generated films using three-dimensional synthetic actors. It is based mainly on the production of the film Rendez-vous a Montreal, an animated film that uses advanced computer techniques to achieve such effects as reincarnating film stars Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe. The main purpose of Rendez-vous a Montreal is to show that true synthetic actors can be created. This fllm represents a technological breakthrough which opens up new vistas in motion pictures, television, and advertising. With this technique, it will now be possible to produce short fllms or motion pictures featuring any celebrity in any situation. The book explains in detail how such a film can be produced using numerous drawings and color pictures. In particular, the following topics are presented: - Preparation of object construction: documentation search, and plaster models preparation - Object construction: digitizing and modeling - Body animation - Hand animation and object grasping - Facial animation: expressions, phonemes and emotions - Choreography: decors, actors, cameras, and lights - Realism: colors, lights, shading, shadows, and textures - Image recording: special effects Finally, an extensive appendix describes in detail the HUMAN FACTORY system.

Synthetic Actors: in Computer-Generated 3D Films (Computer Science Workbench)

An overview of biomechanical modeling of human soft tissue using nonlinear theoretical mechanics and incremental finite element methods, useful for computer simulation of the human musculoskeletal system.

Biomechanical Models for Soft Tissue Simulation (ESPRIT Basic Research Series)

Wu, Yin

Maurel, Walter

Image Synthesis: Theory and Practice is the first book completely dedicated to the numerous techniques of image synthesis. Both theoretical and practical aspects are treated in detail. Numerous impressive computer-generated images are used to explain the most advanced techniques in image synthesis. The book contains a detailed description of the most fundamental algorithms; other less important algorithms are summarized or simply listed. This volume is also a unique handbook of mathematical formulae for image synthesis. The four first chapters of the book survey the basic techniques of computer graphics which play an important role in the design of an image: geometric models, image and viewing transformations, curves and surfaces and solid modeling techniques. In the next chapters, each major topic in image synthesis is presented. The first important problem is the detection and processing of visible surfaces, then two chapters are dedicated to the central problem of light and illumination. As aliasing is a major problem in image rendering, the fundamental antialiasing and motion blur techniques are explained. The most common shadow algorithms are then presented as well as techniques for producing soft shadows and penumbrae. In the last few years, image rendering has been strongly influenced by ray tracing techniques. For this reason, two chapters are dedicated to this important approach. Then a chapter is completely dedicated to fractals from the formal Mandelbrot theory to the recursive subdivision approaches. Natural phenomena present a particularly difficult challenge in image synthesis. For this reason, a large portion of the book is devoted to latest methods to simulate these phenomena: particle systems, scalar fields, volume density scattering models. Various techniques are also described for representing terrains, mountains, water, waves, sky, clouds, fog, fire, trees, and grass. Several techniques for combining images are also explained: adaptive rendering, montage and composite methods. The last chapter presents in detail the MIRALab image synthesis software.

Image Synthesis: Theory and Practice (Computer Science Workbench)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Thalmann, Daniel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Thalmann, Daniel