Evaluating Graph Drawing Aesthetics

This chapter describes a long-term project that investigates the validity of the design principles — not from the perspective of computational efficiency, but from the perspective of human comprehension — upon which many automatic graph layout algorithms are based. It describes a framework for experimentation in this area, the overall methodology used throughout, as well as the details of the experiments themselves. It shows the development of the empirical ideas and methods as the project matured and provides reflections on each experiment, demonstrating the difficulty of initiating a new experimental research area. The chapter suggests how the current results should best be interpreted, as well as ideas for future work in this area.

Screenspace

From tiny interactive cellphone screens (keitai) to supersized jumbo LED displays, Tokyo’s urban landscape is changing drastically. A corner that once displayed billboards that occasionally flipped has now become lit-up and is in constant motion. Keitai, with their built-in cameras, now allow images to be sent from one to another and have become essential to urban life. As these screens become architectural and fashion statements, Tokyo’s nomadic high-tech culture is commuting even greater distances, living in more compact housing, and allowing for “cellspace” and “screenspace” to merge.

Digital Prepress

This chapter identifies changes that the printing industry has undergone during the past 25 years as a result of the digital revolution. It also provides a brief historical perspective of the printing industry and how it has evolved. It is undeniable that the computer has had an impact on the development of print media and today it is rare to find any prepress work done without the use of some digital technology. The workflow of a traditional printed piece is described from start to finish and is compared to a more modern digital workflow to familiarize readers with the processes and contrast the old with the new techniques. This chapter will identify common problems that occur in the preparation of print media using digital technologies. In particular, it will explore a variety of problems and solutions related to the use of digital prepress as well as identifying new innovations intended to improve prepress operations in the future.

Teaching Computer Graphics and Multimedia

This chapter defines and examines situations, problems, and processes faced by teachers of technology. Based on experience teaching at three colleges with different economic, academic, ethnic, and financial attributes, this chapter provides stable and practical approaches to solving common issues. Each school environment and student population presents different technical and interpersonal challenges. Real experiences involving set up of college laboratories, development of digital curriculum, and creation of accredited programs are highlighted and transferred into tangible strategies. If you are new to teaching digital subjects, this text may help you get started. If you are an experienced teacher, this may bring you a new strategy or perspective. Ultimately, this chapter aims to assist student teachers, experienced teachers, artists, information technologists, and computer scientists in becoming stronger in transferring knowledge and skills in the digital realm. In addition, the chapter hopes to invite scholars and educators to explore teaching computer graphics and multimedia within the context of their own disciplines.

Analysis of Musical Content in Digital Audio

Automatic analysis of digital audio with musical content is a difficult — but important — task for various applications in computer music, audio compression, and music information retrieval. This chapter contains a brief review of audio analysis as it relates to music, followed by three case studies of recently developed systems which analyse specific aspects of music. The first system is BeatRoot, a beat tracking system that finds the temporal location of musical beats in an audio recording, analogous to the way that people tap their feet in time to music. The second system is JTranscriber, an interactive automatic transcription system, which recognises musical notes and converts them into MIDI format allowing interactive monitoring and correction of the extracted MIDI data via a multimedia interface. The third system is the Performance Worm, a real time system for visualisation of musical expression, which presents in real time a two-dimensional animation of variations in tempo and loudness.

Everything That Can Communicate Will

The concept of aligning and managing digital assets is a reaction to the evolution of digital production and digital networks. The understanding of this evolution is rooted in experiences in library and museum communities, the digital solutions and design disciplines, the communications and entertainment industries, and law. Aligning and managing digital assets is predicated upon the notion that everything that can communicate will and, in a sense, begins to approach what neuroscience has been telling us for quite some time — that everything actually does communicate in some way or other. There are a number of levels of digital assets. Digital assets are created and maintained in support systems architecture, in digital production tools, in digital content development, in taxonomy development, in user destination designs, in audience interactions, and in legal monitoring. Being digital means everything can be accounted for, everything can communicate, everything has value, and everything can last. Acquiring, merging, or divesting a digital enterprise requires comprehensive digital asset management at every level.

Content-Based Video Indexing and Retrieval

Recent advances in digital video compression and networks have made videos more accessible than ever. Several content-based video retrieval systems have been proposed in the past. In this chapter, we first review these existing content-based video retrieval systems and then propose a new framework, called ClassView, to make some advances towards more efficient content-based video retrieval. This framework includes: (a) an efficient video content analysis and representation scheme to support high-level visual concept characterization; (b) a hierarchical video classification technique to bridge the semantic gap between low-level visual features and high-level semantic visual concepts; and (c) a hierarchical video database indexing structure to enable video access over large-scale database. Integrating video access with efficient database indexing tree structures has provided a great opportunity for supporting more powerful video search engines.

Isoluminance Contours

This chapter introduces the Isoluminance Contour Model, which not only provides a quick and easy method for generating images, but also dramatically reduces the amount of work required by traditional computer graphics methods. It starts with the history of the model from its conception in 1981: it was used to generate flat-shaded greyscale, simple, primitive objects such as cubes, cylinders, cones, and spheres, by generating full-color smooth-shaded images for animated sequences. The model compares the degree of realism and the speed of production it generates with that achieved by using smooth shading and ray-tracing methods. It ultimately describes how the amount of data used by the Isoluminance Contour Model can be adapted dynamically to suit the screen size of the primitive object being generated, making real-time 4-dimensional animated visualization feasible on a Pentium 400 (or equivalent) or faster PC.

Client and Server Side Programming Concepts Incorporating Macromedia Flash

This chapter demonstrates the usefulness of Macromedia Flash MX as a medium for providing interactive content. The motivation for using Flash is presented first. This is followed by an overview of Flash, a brief illustration of Flash’s animation ability, and a straightforward example of data communication from a Flash movie to an external server-side script. Furthermore, basic concepts of object-oriented programming are introduced within the context of the application. The similarity of Flash’s ActionScript to other object-oriented scripting languages is mentioned, and the important non-linear aspect of program development using Flash is pointed out. It is intended that an understanding of Flash’s underlying principles make it more accessible to a larger audience of web designers and developers.

Adaptive Narrative Virtual Environments

Narratives are an important method of human-to-human communication. Combining the power of narrative with the flexibility of virtual environments (VEs) can create new and innovative opportunities in education, in entertainment, and in visualization. In this chapter, we explore the topic of narrative VEs. We describe the characteristics and benefits of narrative VEs, review related work in VEs and in computer-generated narrative, and outline components of an architecture for managing narrative VEs. We present the current status of our work developing such an architecture and conclude by discussing what the future of narrative VEs may hold.