Correcting the Great Mistake People often mistake one thing for another. That’s human nature. However, one would expect the leaders in a particular ?eld of endeavour to have superior ab- ities to discriminate among the developments within that ?eld. That is why it is so perplexing that the technology elite – supposedly savvy folk such as software developers, marketers and businessmen – have continually mistaken Web-based graphics for something it is not. The ?rst great graphics technology for the Web,VRML,has been mistaken for something else since its inception. Viewed variously as a game system,a format for architectural walkthroughs,a platform for multi-user chat and an augmentation of reality,VRML may qualify as the least understood invention in the history of inf- mation technology. Perhaps it is so because when VRML was originally introduced it was touted as a tool for putting the shopping malls of the world online,at once prosaic and horrifyingly mundane to those of us who were developing it. Perhaps those ?rst two initials,“VR”,created expectations of sprawling,photorealistic f- tasy landscapes for exploration and play across the Web. Or perhaps the magnitude of the invention was simply too great to be understood at the time by the many, ironically even by those spending the money to underwrite its development. Regardless of the reasons,VRML suffered in the mainstream as it was twisted to meet unintended ends and stretched far beyond its limitations.

This volume aims to stimulate discussions on research involving the use of data and digital images as an understanding approach for analysis and visualization of phenomena and experiments. The emphasis is put not only on graphically representing data as a way of increasing its visual analysis, but also on the imaging systems which contribute greatly to the comprehension of real cases. Scientific Visualization and Imaging Systems encompass multidisciplinary areas, with applications in many knowledge fields such as Engineering, Medicine, Material Science, Physics, Geology, Geographic Information Systems, among others. This book is a selection of 13 revised and extended research papers presented in the International Conference on Advanced Computational Engineering and Experimenting -ACE-X conferences 2010 (Paris), 2011 (Algarve), 2012 (Istanbul) and 2013 (Madrid). The examples were particularly chosen from materials research, medical applications, general concepts applied in simulations and image analysis and other interesting related problems.

This book covers various aspects of spatial data modelling specifically regarding three-dimensional (3D) modelling and structuring. The realization of "true" 3D geoinformation spatial systems requires a high input, and the developmental process is taking place in various research centers and universities around the globe. The development of such systems and solutions, including the modelling theories are presented in this book.

Explains the multimodal connections of text, image, space, body, sound and speech, in both old and new computer-mediated communication systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Active Media Technology, AMT 2009, held in Beijing, China, in October 2009. The 47 revised full papers and the 6 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected. The papers reflect the shared forum for researchers and practitioniers from diverse fields, such as computer science, information technology, artificial intelligence, media engineering, economics, data mining, data and knowledge engineering, intelligent agent technology, human computer interaction, complex systems and systems science. The book offers new insights into the main research challenges and development of AMT by revealing the interplay between the studies of human informatics and research of informatics on the Web/Internet, mobile and wireless centric intelligent information processing systems.

The first book that deals specifically with visualization of the XML-based Web. It presents the state-of-the-art research in this area and focuses on key topics such as: visualization of semantic and structural information and metadata; exploring and querying XML documents using interactive multimedia interfaces; topic map visualization; visual modelling of XML/RDF ontologies and schemas; rendering and viewing of XML documents; SVG/X3D: new visualization techniques for the semantic web; and methods used to construct high quality metadata/metadata taxonomies. Most of the techniques and methods discussed here can be applied now, making this book essential reading for SML and Web developers as well as visualization researchers.

The interaction between a user and a device forms the foundation of today’s application design. Covering the following topics: A suite of five structural principles helping designers to structure their mockups; An agile method for exploiting desktop eye tracker equipment in combination with mobile devices; An approach to explore large-scale collections based on classification systems; A framework based on the use of modeling and components composition techniques to simplify the development of organizational collaborative systems; A low-cost virtual reality system that provides highly satisfying virtual experiences; Popular hardware and software tools and technologies for developing augmented and virtual reality applications; An implementation to handle connectivity between virtual reality applications and SensAble® Technology Phantom Haptic Devices; The results of a research study implementing a teaching technological strategy to help Down syndrome children develop their reading skills; Platform independent models decreasing the level of cohesion between communication technologies and software for ubiquitous computing; A method for applying gamification as a tool to improve the participation and motivation of people in performing different tasks. New Trends in Interaction, Virtual Reality and Modeling collects the best research from Interacción 2012 and MexIHC 2012, and presents the state-of-the-art in human-computer interaction, user interfaces, user experience and virtual reality. Written by researchers from leading universities, research institutes and industry, this volume forms a valuable source of reference for researchers in HCI and VR.