Produced as part of the Art and Virtual Environment Project conducted at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Banff, Canada from 1991 to 1994.

Immersed tunnels have been around for more than a century but remain a relatively unknown form of tunnel construction. For waterway crossings they are an effective alternative to bored tunnels and bridges, particularly in shallower waters, soft alluvial soils, and earthquake-prone areas. Successful implementation requires a thorough understanding of a wide variety of civil engineering disciplines and construction techniques. Immersed Tunnels brings together in one volume all aspects of immersed tunnels from initial feasibility and planning, through design and construction, to operation and maintenance. Get Valuable Insights into Immersed Tunnel Engineering from Expert Practitioners The book presents design and construction principles to give a full appreciation not only of what is involved in an immersed tunnel scheme but also how potential problems are dealt with and overcome. It examines important factors that have to be considered, particularly environmental implications and mechanical and electrical systems. It also gives practical examples of how specific techniques have been used in various projects and highlights issues that designers and constructors should be aware of. In addition, the book discusses operation and maintenance and reviews contractual matters. These aspects are described from the viewpoint of two experienced practitioners in the field who have a wealth of experience on immersed tunnel projects worldwide. As tunnels are increasingly being adopted as engineering solutions around the world, this unique and extensively illustrated reference explores the wide variety of immersed tunnel techniques available to designers and constructors. It provides essential insight for anyone involved, or seeking to be involved, with immersed tunnel projects.

An overview of the art historical antecedents to virtual reality and the impact of virtual reality on contemporary conceptions of art. Although many people view virtual reality as a totally new phenomenon, it has its foundations in an unrecognized history of immersive images. Indeed, the search for illusionary visual space can be traced back to antiquity. In this book, Oliver Grau shows how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion and immersion. He describes the metamorphosis of the concepts of art and the image and relates those concepts to interactive art, interface design, agents, telepresence, and image evolution. Grau retells art history as media history, helping us to understand the phenomenon of virtual reality beyond the hype. Grau shows how each epoch used the technical means available to produce maximum illusion. He discusses frescoes such as those in the Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii and the gardens of the Villa Livia near Primaporta, Renaissance and Baroque illusion spaces, and panoramas, which were the most developed form of illusion achieved through traditional methods of painting and the mass image medium before film. Through a detailed analysis of perhaps the most important German panorama, Anton von Werner's 1883 The Battle of Sedan, Grau shows how immersion produced emotional responses. He traces immersive cinema through Cinerama, Sensorama, Expanded Cinema, 3-D, Omnimax and IMAX, and the head mounted display with its military origins. He also examines those characteristics of virtual reality that distinguish it from earlier forms of illusionary art. His analysis draws on the work of contemporary artists and groups ART+COM, Maurice Benayoun, Charlotte Davies, Monika Fleischmann, Ken Goldberg, Agnes Hegedues, Eduardo Kac, Knowbotic Research, Laurent Mignonneau, Michael Naimark, Simon Penny, Daniela Plewe, Paul Sermon, Jeffrey Shaw, Karl Sims, Christa Sommerer, and Wolfgang Strauss. Grau offers not just a history of illusionary space but also a theoretical framework for analyzing its phenomenologies, functions, and strategies throughout history and into the future.

Highlights key research currently being undertaken within the field of telepresence, providing the most detailed account of the field to date, advancing our understanding of a fundamental property of all media - the illusion of presence; the sense of “being there” inside a virtual environment, with actual or virtual others. This collection has been put together by leading international scholars from America, Europe, and Asia. Together, they describe the state-of-the-art in presence theory, research and technology design for an advanced academic audience. Immersed in Media provides research that can help designers optimize presence for users of advanced media technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, collaborative social media, robotics, and artificial intelligence and lead us to better understand human cognition, emotion and behaviour.

This book provides an introduction to the immersed interface method (IIM), a powerful numerical method for solving interface problems and problems defined on irregular domains for which analytic solutions are rarely available. This book gives a complete description of the IIM, discusses recent progress in the area, and describes numerical methods for a number of classic interface problems. It also contains many numerical examples that can be used as benchmark problems for numerical methods designed for interface problems on irregular domains.