Download or read book Virtual Landscapes written by Umran Ali and published by Umran Ali. This book was released on 2012-09-19 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The magical essence of natural landscapes since the dawn of man have been a source of intrigue, wonder and inspiration in art, philosophy and literature. With each new era in civilisation, new methods of creative expression have been used by artists, designers and writers to capture the rich natural landscapes, and with the 21st century and the emergence of new interactive technologies, this innate desire is being expressed through the digital domain. From the giant mushroom forests of Morrowind, the Archipelago islands of Zelda: Wind Waker, to the tropical underground caves of Phantasy Star Online, Virtual landscapes have enthralled, captured and engaged player imaginations for over 30 years. Virtual Landscapes is a three part series attempting to, for the first time, visually illustrate, share and critically reflect upon the unique, virtual natural landscapes within Computer & Video Games. Virtual Landscapes: The Modern Era visually illustrates the revolution in complexity and richness of virtual natural landscapes that occurred in computer & video games from 2000 to modern day. From the tranquil landscapes of Morrowind, the rolling forested autumn hills of Oblivion, the eerie landscapes of The Witcher, through to the beautiful deep crimson Maple forests of Phantasy Star Universe, the vast epic landscapes of Skyrim, and finally to the lonely landscapes of Dear Esther, Virtual Landscapes presents these virtual spaces for the first time, in stunning unseen digitally enhanced. high resolution and panoramic forms.
Download or read book Modern Approaches to the Visualization of Landscapes written by Dennis Edler and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-31 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume deals with the effects of digitization on spatial and especially landscape construction processes and their visualization. A focus lies on the generation mechanisms of 'landscapes' with digital tools of cartography and geomatics, including possibilities to model and visualize non-visual stimuli, but also spatial-temporal changes of physical space. Another focus is on how virtual spaces have already become part of the social and individual construction of landscape. Potentials of combining modern media of spatial visualization and (constructivist) landscape research are discussed.
Download or read book Exploration Without Boundaries written by Hilary Rhodes and published by Melbourne Univ. Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploration Without Boundaries invites you on a journey of reflection and fantasy through 48 digital landscapes - dreamlike yet reminiscent of familiar places. Hilary Rhodes has created an evocative place that is truly not of this world. Share her vision through environments that are non-photographic and totally invented, created pixel by pixel via fractal texture synthesis. Each environment features background music generated from the profiles of the landforms using special synaesthetic software.
Download or read book African Landscapes written by Michael Bollig and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-06-12 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landscape studies provide a crucial perspective into the interaction between humans and their environment, shedding insight on social, cultural, and economic topics. The research explores both the way that natural processes have affected the development of culture and society, as well as the ways that natural landscapes themselves are the product of historical and cultural processes. Most previous studies of the landscape selectively focused on either the natural sciences or the social sciences, but the research presented in African Landscapes bridges that gap. This work is unique in its interdisciplinary scope. Over the past twelve years, the contributors to this volume have participated in the collaborative research center ACACIA (Arid Climate Adaptation and Cultural Innovation in Africa), which deals with the relationship between cultural processes and ecological dynamics in Africa’s arid areas. The case studies presented here come from mainly Sahara/Sahel and southwestern Africa, and are all linked to broader discussions on the concept of landscape, and themes of cultural, anthropological, geographical, botanical, sociological, and archaeological interest. The contributions in this work are enhanced by full color photographs that put the discussion in context visually.
Download or read book Architectural Approach to Level Design written by Christopher W. Totten and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2019-04-25 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a game developer and professor trained in architecture, An Architectural Approach to Level Design is one of the first books to integrate architectural and spatial design theory with the field of level design. It explores the principles of level design through the context and history of architecture. Now in its second edition, An Architectural Approach to Level Design presents architectural techniques and theories for you to use in your own work. The author connects architecture and level design in different ways that address the practical elements of how designers construct space and the experiential elements of how and why humans interact with that space. It also addresses industry issues like how to build interesting tutorial levels and how to use computer-generated level design systems without losing the player-focused design of handmade levels. Throughout the text, you will learn skills for spatial layout, evoking emotion through gamespaces, and creating better levels through architectural theory. FEATURES Presents case studies that offer insight on modern level design practices, methods, and tools Presents perspectives from industry designers, independent game developers, scientists, psychologists, and academics Explores how historical structures can teach us about good level design Shows how to use space to guide or elicit emotion from players Includes chapter exercises that encourage you to use principles from the chapter in digital prototypes, playtesting sessions, paper mock-ups, and design journals Bringing together topics in game design and architecture, this book helps you create better spaces for your games. Software independent, the book discusses tools and techniques that you can use in crafting your interactive worlds.
Download or read book Designing Green Landscapes written by Klaus Gadow and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-02-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the natural resources of the earth continue to diminish, “Green Landscapes” arebeingcalleduponto produceanincreasingrangeofgoodsandservices.A Green Landscape is a rural expanse of scenery that may comprise a variety of visible f- tures. This book focuses on forested landscapes, although much of the theory and most of the practical applications are valid for any area of land. In many regions of the world, people depend on forests for their livelihood and well-being. Forests provide multiple services, – bene ts generated for society by the existence of c- tain forest ecosystems and their attributes. The value of these bene ts is often only recognised when they are lost after removal of the trees, resulting in ooding, loss of income and declining species diversity. Forests provide multiple services. However, the amount and quality, and the p- ticular mix of these services depend on the condition of the resource. Landscape design is a proven way to ensure that certain desired bene ts will be available in space and time. It provides the foundation and an essential starting point for s- tainable management. This volume, which forms part of Springer’s book series Managing Forest Ecosystems,presentsstate-of-the-artresearchresults,visionsandtheories,aswell as speci c methodsfor designing Green Landscapes, as a basis for sustainable ecos- tem management. The book contains a wealth of information which may be useful to companymanagement,the legal and policy environmentand forestry administ- tors. The volume is subdivided into four sections.
Download or read book Social Virtual Worlds and Their Places written by Merrill L. Johnson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-11 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a foundational look at social virtual worlds from the geographer’s perspective. How can the geographer’s craft be applied to social virtual worlds? This question is addressed through careful analysis of what social virtual worlds are, how interest in these worlds has waxed and waned during the twenty-first century, and the meaning of their concocted spaces. Examining one of the key features of the social virtual world, the avatar, the book focuses on its user's motivations and identity choices. The book draws on the geographical understanding of place to examine where avatars live, work, and roam, and describes how virtual-world places resemble and diverge from actual-world places. A mixed-methods survey conducted in Second Life adds additional breadth to the discussion, whilst a series of vignettes gives extra life to the subject matter. This original exploration of the content and meaning of social virtual worlds is an essential resource for geographers, and for anyone interested in the virtual world experience.
Download or read book Conflict Landscapes and Archaeology from Above written by Birger Stichelbaut and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of conflict archaeology has developed rapidly over the last decade, fuelled in equal measure by technological advances and creative analytical frameworks. Nowhere is this truer than in the inter-disciplinary fields of archaeological practice that combine traditional sources such as historical photographs and maps with 3D digital topographic data from Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) and large scale geophysical prospection. For twentieth-century conflict landscapes and their surviving archaeological remains, these developments have encouraged a shift from a site oriented approach towards landscape-scaled research. This volume brings together an wide range of perspectives, setting traditional approaches that draw on historical and contemporary aerial photographs alongside cutting-edge prospection techniques, cross-disciplinary analyses and innovative methods of presenting this material to audiences. Essays from a range of disciplines (archaeology, history, geography, heritage and museum studies) studying conflict landscapes across the globe throughout the twentieth century, all draw on aerial and landscape perspectives to past conflicts and their legacy and the complex issues for heritage management. Organized in four parts, the first three sections take a broadly chronological approach, exploring the use of aerial evidence to expand our understanding of the two World Wars and the Cold War. The final section explores ways that the aerial perspective can be utilized to represent historical landscapes to a wide audience. With case studies ranging from the Western Front to the Cold War, Ireland to Russia, this volume demonstrates how an aerial perspective can both support and challenge traditional archaeological and historical analysis, providing an innovative new means of engaging with the material culture of conflict and commemoration.
Download or read book Gothic Landscapes written by Sharon Rose Yang and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the ways that Gothic literature has been transformed since the 18th century across cultures and across genres. In a series of essays written by scholars in the field, the book focuses on landscape in the Gothic and the ways landscape both reflects and reveals the dark elements of culture and humanity. It goes beyond traditional approaches to the Gothic by pushing the limits of the definition of the genre. From landscape painting to movies and video games, from memoir to fiction, and from works of different cultural origins and perspectives, this volume traverses the geography of the Gothic revealing the anxieties that still haunt humanity into the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Virtual Weaponry written by Aaron Tucker and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-26 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the convergent paths of the Internet and the American military, interweaving a history of the militarized Internet with analysis of a number of popular Hollywood movies in order to track how the introduction of the Internet into the war film has changed the genre, and how the movies often function as one part of the larger Military-Industrial- Media-Entertainment Network and the Total War Machine. The book catalogues and analyzes representations of a militarized Internet in popular Hollywood cinema, arguing that such illustrations of digitally networked technologies promotes an unhealthy transhumanism that weaponizes the relationships between the biological and technological aspects of that audience, while also hierarchically placing the “human” components at the top. Such filmmaking and movie-watching should be replaced with a critical posthumanism that challenges the relationships between the audience and their technologies, in addition to providing critical tools that can be applied to understanding and potentially resist modern warfare.
Download or read book Virtual Reality written by Alan Wexelblat and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2014-05-10 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtual Reality: Applications and Explorations provides information pertinent to the fundamental aspects of virtual reality and artificial reality. This book discusses the potential applications of virtual reality. Organized into three parts encompassing 10 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the traditional computer science activities ad discusses how hard problems in computer science can be addressed with virtual reality ideas and technology. This text then explores some applications of virtual reality technology that could potentially touch almost every purposeful activity that humans undertake in a technological civilization. Other chapters consider the use of virtual reality to manage and present to users information that cannot otherwise be comprehended. This book discusses as well the use of artificial worlds in both computer art and virtual reality. The final chapter deals with how the ideas of virtual reality and artificial reality can be of use to anyone who has to manage a business or organization. This book is a valuable resource for computer scientists.
Download or read book Forests and Landscapes written by Stephen Richard John Sheppard and published by CABI. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forests are an important component in the visual appeal of landscapes. There is an increasing recognition of the importance of this subject among foresters and environmental scientists. Increasingly, forest resource managers must consider the aesthetic consequences of timber harvesting operations and management plans. This book is the first to address this subject area. It consists of 15 chapters and is divided into four parts. It brings together not only foresters and ecologists, but also landscape architects, psychologists and philosophers. It should therefore attract a wide readership. Contributors are leading research workers in their subjects, from Canada, the USA and UK.
Download or read book Emerging Landscapes written by Davide Deriu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerging Landscapes brings together scholars and practitioners working in a wide range of disciplines within the fields of the built environment and visual arts to explore landscape as an idea, an image, and a material practice in an increasingly globalized world. Drawing on the synergies between the fields of architecture and photography, this collection takes a multidisciplinary approach, combining practice-based research with scholarly essays. It explores and critically reassesses the interface between representation - the imaginary and symbolic shaping of the human environment - and production - the physical and material changes wrought on the land. At a time of environmental crisis and the ’end of nature, ’shifting geopolitical boundaries and economic downturn, Emerging Landscapes reflects on the state of landscape and its future, mapping those practices that creatively address the boundaries between possibility, opportunity and action in imagining and shaping landscape.
Download or read book Landscapes Beyond Land written by Arnar Árnason and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012-09-15 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Land is embedded in a multitude of material and cultural contexts, through which the human experience of landscape emerges. Ethnographers, with their participative methodologies, long-term co-residence, and concern with the quotidian aspects of the places where they work, are well positioned to describe landscapes in this fullest of senses. The contributors explore how landscapes become known primarily through movement and journeying rather than stasis. Working across four continents, they explain how landscapes are constituted and recollected in the stories people tell of their journeys through them, and how, in turn, these stories are embedded in landscaped forms.
Download or read book The Future of Agricultural Landscapes Part II written by and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2021-03-18 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advances in Ecological Research, Part Two, Volume 64, the latest release in this ongoing series, includes specific chapters on Tropical Ecosystems in the 21st Century. Chapters in this volume cover topics such as landscape-scale expansion of agroecology to enhance natural pest control, a systematic review and ecosystem services, and the resilience of agricultural landscapes. Provides information that relates to a thorough understanding of the field of ecology Deals with topical and important reviews on the physiologies, populations and communities of plants and animals
Download or read book The Future of Agricultural Landscapes Part I written by and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advances in Ecological Research, Volume 63, the latest release in this ongoing series includes specific chapters on Tropical Ecosystems in the 21st Century. Chapters in this volume cover topics such as Landscape-scale expansion of agroecology to enhance natural pest control: a systematic review and Ecosystem services and the resilience of agricultural landscapes Provides information that relates to a thorough understanding of the field of ecology Deals with topical and important reviews on the physiologies, populations and communities of plants and animals
Download or read book Landscapes as Cultural Heritage in the European Research written by María Ruiz del Árbol Moro and published by Editorial CSIC - CSIC Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: El objetivo principal de la acción COST A27 es la identificación y evaluación de elementos y estructuras preindustriales en los paisajes europeos amenazados por el abandono de actividades mineras y agrarias tradicionales. El coloquio sobre los paisajes como patrimonio cultural en la investigación europea constituyó un primer punto de encuentro tanto para los investigadores implicados en la acción como para otros expertos externos. Los textos recogidos en esta publicación muestran el creciente interés por el tomo, por la recuperación de los paisajes como una parte esencial del patrimonio cultural y por las nuevas vías para su puesta en valor, promoción y gestión, en el marco global de la planificación territorial.
