Just a few years ago, virtual reality was regarded as more a toy than a tool. Today, however, it is becoming the enabling technology for man-machine communications. The rapid development of graphics hardware and soft ware makes its application possible. Besides building walkthroughs and landscape fly-overs with very realistic visual effects, we can recognize the trend toward industrial applications. This is because of the emerging need for tools for rapid product development. Especially in the aeronautical and automotive industries, companies have began to investigate and develop virtual...

This book is based on lectures presented at an international workshop on geometric modeling held at Hewlett Packard GmbH in Boblingen, FRG, in June 1990. International experts from academia and industry were selected to speak on the most interesting topics in geometric modeling. The resulting papers, published in this volume, give a state-of-the-art survey of the relevant problems and issues. The following topics are discussed: - Methods for constructing surfaces on surfaces: four different solutions to the multidimen sional problem of constructing an interpolant from surface data are...

1 Aims and Features of This Book The contents of t. his book were originally planned t. o be included in a book en titled Geometric lIIodeling and CAD/CAM to be written by M. Hosaka and F. Kimura, but since the draft. of my part of the book was finished much earlier than Kimura's, we decided to publish this part separately at first. In it, geometrically oriented basic methods and tools used for analysis and synthesis of curves and surfaces used in CAD/CAM, various expressions and manipulations of free-form surface patches and their connection, interference as well as their qualit. y eval...

Multimedia techniques enable the production of non-traditional documents containing enourmous amounts of information. The production of such documents by a group, as opposed to an individual, is the main subject of this book. A group needs to communicate, and multimedia technology can be used to enhance group communication. How multimedia documentation and communication and groups of authors fit together are the main questions tackled. The book describes the construction of a conceptual framework and the prototype system, CoMEdiA, as well as how the system was used to conduct a group...

A little more than a decade ago my colleagues and I faced the necessity for providing a database management system which might commonly serve a number of different types of computer aided design applications at different manufacturing enterprises. We evaluated some wellknown cases of conceptual models and commercially available DBMSs, and found none fuHy meeting the requirements. Yet the analysis of them led us to the development of what we named the Logical Structure Management System (LMS). Syntactically the LMS language is somewhat similar to ALPHA by E. F. Codd. The underly ing conceptual...

Advances in computing and communications have brought about an increasing demand for visual information. Visual Computing addresses the principles behind "visual technology," and provides readers with a good understanding of how the integration of Computer Graphics, Visual Perception and Imaging is achieved.
Included in the book is an overview of important research areas within this integration which will be useful for further work in the field. Foundations of visual perception and psychophysics are presented as well as basic methods of imaging and computer vision.
This...

Multimedia computing is a logical next step by which computing technology will become ever more useful and ubiquitous in our everyday lives. From the perspective of technical challenges, multimedia affects nearly every aspect of computer hardware and software. The long-heralded marriage of computing, communications, and information services is now being consummated, and is manifesting itself in literally dozens of new alliances between companies ranging from semiconductors to cable TV, from newspapers and telephone companies to computer hardware and software.

Document imaging is a new discipline in applied computer science. It is building bridges between computer graphics, the world of prepress and press, and the areas of color vision and color reproduction. The focus of this book is of special relevance to people learning how to utilize and integrate such available technology as digital printing or short run color, how to make use of CIM techniques for print products, and how to evaluate related technologies that will become relevant in the next few years. This book is the first to give a comprehensive overview of document imaging, the areas...

One of the important issues of Scientific Visualization is the utilization of the broad bandwidth of the human sensory system in steering and interpreting complex processes and simulations involving voluminous data sets across diverse scientific disciplines. This book presents the state-of-the-art in visualization techniques both as an overview for the inquiring scientist, and as a solid platform from which developers may extend existing techniques or devise new ones to meet the specific needs of their problems. A secondary goal in crafting this volume has been to provide a vehicle for...