Real-time fur modeling with simulation of physical effects

Ankara : The Department of Computer Engineering and the Graduate School of Engineering and Science of Bilkent University, 2012.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2012.Includes bibliographical references leaves 51-54.Fur is one of the important visual aspects of animals and it is quite challenging to model it in computer graphics. This is due to rendering and animating high amounts of geometry taking excessive time in our personal computers. Thus in computer games most of the animals are without fur or covered with a single layer of texture. But these current methods do not provide the reality and even if the rendering in the game is realistic the fur is omitted. There have been several models to render a fur, but the methods that incorporate rendering are not in real-time, on the other hand most of the real-time methods omit many of the natural aspects , such as; texture lighting, shadow and animation. Thus the outcome is not sufficient for realistic gaming experience. In this thesis we propose a real-time fur represantation that can be used on 3D objects. Moreover, we demonstrate how to; render, animate and burn this real-time fur.Arıyürek, SinanM.S

Worlds of Wonder: National Parks, Zoos, Disney, and the Genealogies of Wonder in U.S. Culture.

“Worlds of Wonder: National Parks, Zoos, Disney, and the Genealogies of Wonder in U.S. Culture” is an environmental cultural study that focuses on three institutional contexts and histories shaped by wonder rhetoric. These sites ground my articulation of three genealogies of wonder, based in (1) travel and the foundation of the U.S. national parks; (2) histories of scientific collecting and zoos; and (3) technological innovations and Disney attractions. Wonder, I argue, is not a conceptual given. It is a historically shaped emotion and discourse that has become a major discursive force for thinking about U.S. environments. Wonder has a distinctive history in the U.S., and I show that over the course of the nineteenth century, it was first used as a shifting signifier to describe a range of sights and experiences; it then became a codified rhetoric referring to particular kinds of landscapes and experiences that were, in turn, commodified through tourism. In tracing the codification of wonder and its institutional uses, “Worlds of Wonder” offers a cultural and literary analysis grounded in readings of a varied set of textual and visual media. Focusing on specific moments in institutional history, I analyze archival materials such as Northern Pacific Railway’s Wonderland guidebooks and advertising campaign; visual and textual rhetorical practices of travel narratives by Washington Irving, Alexis de Tocqueville, Frances Trollope, John Charles Fremont, Edwin Bryant, Samuel Bowles, Theodore Dreiser; and material sites, such as exhibits at zoos in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, San Diego, the Bronx, and theme park attractions such as Disney California Adventure’s “World of Color”. Each chapter examines wonder in the context of several interdisciplinary fields: chapter one locates wonder in environmental history and American literary and cultural studies; chapter two treats wonder and affect studies, animal studies, and zoo history; and chapter three contributes to Disney studies and technological histories. These interdisciplinary contexts ground my argument that national parks, zoos, and Disney theme parks create and deploy wonder discourses in the making of “experience economies” that produce collective wonder practices and define ways of participating in the nation, ecological worlds, and globalized corporate environments.PHDComparative LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110324/1/gcreedon_1.pd

Visualizing a new sustainable world: toward the next generation of virtual reality in the built environment

What is the future of virtual reality (VR) in the built environment? As work becomes increasingly distributed across remote and hybrid forms of organizing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a need to rethink how we use the set of collaborative technologies to move toward a sustainable world. We propose a new vision of VR as a discipline-agnostic platform for an interdisciplinary integration of the allied design, social, and environmental disciplines to address emerging challenges across the building sectors. We build this contribution through the following steps. First, we contextualize VR technologies within the changing digital landscape and underlying tensions in the built environment practices. Second, we characterize the difficulties that have arisen in using them to address challenges, illustrating our argument with leading examples. Third, we conceptualize VR configurations and explore underlying assumptions for their use across disciplinary scenarios. Fourth, we propose a vision of VR as a discipline-agnostic platform that can support built environment users in visualizing preferred futures. We conclude by providing directions for research and practice

The Development of Design Support System for Participatory Design of Community Environment Improvement using Mixed Reality

13301甲第5410号博士（工学）金沢大学博士論文本文Ful

IT\u27S NOT RAINBOWS AND UNICORNS : REGULATED COMMODITY AND WASTE PRODUCTION IN THE ALBERTA OILSANDS

This dissertation examines the regulated oilsands mining industry of Alberta, Canada, widely considered the world’s largest surface mining project. The industrial processes of oilsands mining produce well over one million barrels of petroleum commodities daily, plus even larger quantities of airborne and semisolid waste. The project argues for a critical account of production concretized in the co-constitutional relations of obdurate materiality and labor activity within a framework of regulated petro-capitalism. This pursuit requires multiple methods that combine archives, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews to understand workers’ shift-to-shift relations inside the “black box” of regulated oilsands mining production where materiality co-constitutes the processes and outcomes of resource development and waste-intensive production. Here, the central contradiction pits the industry’s colossal environmental impact and its regulated environmental relations, which – despite chronic exceedances – are held under some control by provincial and federal environmental agents, further attenuated by firms’ selective voluntary compliance with global quality standards as well as whistleblowers and otherwise “troublesome” employees. ‘It’s not rainbows and unicorns,’ explains one informant, distilling workers’ views of the safety and environmental hazards they simultaneously produce and endure as wage laborers despite pervasive regulation. In addition to buttressing geographical conceptualizations of socionatural resource production, contributions arise in the sympathetic engagement with workers, which may hold useful insights for activism against the industry’s environmental outcomes

The influence of olfaction on the perception of high-fidelity computer graphics

The computer graphics industry is constantly demanding more realistic images and animations. However, producing such high quality scenes can take a long time, even days, if rendering on a single PC. One of the approaches that can be used to speed up rendering times is Visual Perception, which exploits the limitations of the Human Visual System, since the viewers of the results will be humans. Although there is an increasing body of research into how haptics and sound may affect a viewer's perception in a virtual environment, the in uence of smell has been largely ignored. The aim of this thesis is to address this gap and make smell an integral part of multi-modal virtual environments. In this work, we have performed four major experiments, with a total of 840 participants. In the experiments we used still images and animations, related and unrelated smells and finally, a multi-modal environment was considered with smell, sound and temperature. Beside this, we also investigated how long it takes for an average person to adapt to smell and what affect there may be when performing a task in the presence of a smell. The results of this thesis clearly show that a smell present in the environment firstly affects the perception of object quality within a rendered image, and secondly, enables parts of the scene or the whole animation to be selectively rendered in high quality while the rest can be rendered in a lower quality without the viewer noticing the drop in quality. Such selective rendering in the presence of smell results in significant computational performance gains without any loss in the quality of the image or animations perceived by a viewer

The American Western in Canadian Literature

The Western, with its stoic cowboys and quickhanded gunslingers, is an instantly recognizable American genre that has achieved worldwide success. Cultures around the world have embraced but also adapted and critiqued the Western as part of their own national literatures, reinterpreting and expanding the genre in curious ways. Canadian Westerns are almost always in conversation with their American cousins, influenced by their tropes and traditions, responding to their politics, and repurposing their structures to create a national literary phenomenon. The American Western in Canadian Literature examines over a century of the development of the Canadian Western as it responds to the American Western, to evolving literary trends, and to regional, national, and international change. Beginning with Indigenous perspectives on the genre, it moves from early manifestations of the Western in Christian narratives of personal and national growth, and its controversial pulp-fictional popularity in the 1940s, to its postmodern and contemporary critiques, pushing the boundary of the Western to include Northerns, Northwesterns, and post-Westerns in literature, film, and wider cultural imagery. The American Western in Canadian Literature is more than a simple history. It uses genre theory to comment on historical perspectives on nation and region. It includes overviews of Indigenous and settler-colonial critiques of the Western, challenging persistent attitudes to Indigenous people and their traditional territories that are endemic to the genre. It illuminates the way that the Canadian Western enshrines, hagiographies, and ultimately desacralizes aspects of Canadian life, from car culture to extractive industries to assumptions about a Canadian moral high ground. This is a comprehensive, highly readable, and fascinating study of an underexamined genre

Walking Seven Walks : solitaries, spirit-mediums and matrilineal influence in Lisa Robertson’s poetics of soft architecture

“Walking Seven Walks” comprises a full-length manuscript of poems and an exegesis on Canadian poet Lisa Robertson’s poetics of soft architecture and her millennial poem Seven Walks. Entitled Song of the Year, my creative manuscript presents chronologically the results of a daily urban walking practice undertaken between 2017 and 2022. Informed by Robertson’s poetics of soft architecture, a counter-discipline that recomposes space via a feminist lens, my poems reconsider Charles Olson’s “composition by field” (1950), investigate open-form possibilities for reading poems, and pursue the lyric mode’s capacity for realising the temporary and everchanging constitutions of material space. My exegesis makes a literary-historical argument for Lisa Robertson’s Seven Walks as modelling a collective, feminist practice of urban walking that converses with the hidden labours of previous generations of women and confers prophetic possibilities for world- building. I argue Seven Walks, published between 1999 and 2003, represents what I call the “climate fin de siècle” in Robertson’s deployment of baroque aesthetics and the poem’s registration of late-industrial crises. Chapter One positions Robertson in a Romantic context, arguing that her figuration of the soft architect and guide as plural and gender-fluid walkers ironises Rousseau’s model of the “solitary walker” as depicted in Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782). I demonstrate that an alternative and collaborative matrilineal genealogy, via the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and Dorothy Wordsworth, informs Robertson’s walking strategy, which registers and reflects on the effects of late-industrial capitalism, including accelerating financial economies and environmental destruction. Chapter Two argues that spirit-medium discourse is a significant line of matrilineal influence in Seven Walks. I analyse two key mediumistic tropes at work in Seven Walks: the figure of the guide and the spatial unit of the room. I argue that the guide opens the text to modes of more-than-human relating. I also argue that Robertson’s use of the room channels the spirit and influence of Virginia Woolf in “A Room of One’s Own” (1929) and beyond

Surprise Encounters: Readings in Transatlantic Modernism

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, some of the most forceful accounts of modernity have located the traumatic shocks of war, urbanization, and technological change at the heart of modern experience and modernist literature. SURPRISE ENCOUNTERS argues that a dominant framework of shock and rupture has obscured a nineteenth-century conception of surprise, which transformed models of mind and narrative on both sides of the Atlantic. I draw on Ralph Waldo Emerson's formulation of life as "a series of surprises" to distinguish a paradigm of surprise from Walter Benjamin's influential definition of modernity as a "series of shocks and collisions." For Emerson, the fact that we live in an uncertain universe of chance requires moment-by-moment exposure to contingency. The challenge, as he framed it, was to invent new forms of living and writing that allow the unexpected to amplify rather than deaden receptivity, to enrich rather than impoverish experience. "Surprise," one of Emerson's "lords of life," guided such American writers as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen, but also Benjamin's shock poets par excellence--Baudelaire and Proust. Each translates Emerson's central question--How do I live so that every moment is new?--into compositional terms, to ask: How do I write so that every sentence is new? Their widely various responses to the Emersonian call hinge on unexpected syntactical and scenic turns that reorient attention and restructure narrative form. My chapters locate surprise in Proust's and Baudelaire's techniques for collapsing timelessness with the ephemeral (modernist methods I trace back to Emerson's "method of nature"); in the lacunae that lodge between past and future tenses in James's scenes of recognition; in Stein's cultivation of fresh grammars of attention; and in Larsen's challenge to Anglo-American master plots that deadeningly dovetail with the deterministic logic of race and reproduction. Each writer's dedication to renewal--temporal, psychic, grammatical, narrative--reframes the present as an open site of experiential and experimental possibility. Beyond representing surprise, the writers of this study are dedicated to training new habits of attention to the unpredictable events that punctuate daily life. In this endeavor, they join psychologists William James and Silvan Tomkins in theorizing surprise as a sudden event that both arrests and spurs processes of feeling and thinking. The literary subject of each chapter is a theorist of emotion and modern experience who exercises a capacity to express as well as enact the aesthetic and psychic dimensions of surprise

Landscape Strategies in Architecture

The central question and purpose of the thesis is to understand how landscape as a design concept is changing our understanding of architecture. It explores the ways in which landscape is relevant for design strategies in architecture. Buildings that have been designed like landscapes have become a topic in contemporary architecture and in the recent literature about it. The apparent distinction between architecture and landscape is questioned in exemplary theoretical works and building designs with increasing interest in landscape as a phenomenon of contemporary architecture. To understand this phenomenon this thesis first explores the term of landscape and its design. The introduction focuses on the exploration of the idea of landscape and how it is applicable in architectural design. Strategies of landscape design as they are discussed in contemporary landscape architecture are defined and illustrated with specific examples. This view is contrasted with the idea of nature in architecture. Architecture's concepts of nature reveal some crucial problems that lead to the polarity of 'wild' nature and 'human' architecture. With a critique of these common architectural theories and within the methodological differentiation the thesis reveals the necessity of research through analysis of landscape spatial composition in architecture. The core of this thesis is three case studies of architectural designs that approach a building like a landscape. A selection of analytical techniques is applied to key cases in three central chapters. The main analytical model for landscape architectural composition that Steenbergen and Reh (2003) developed for the European Gardens of the Renaissance, Baroque and Enlightenment is applied as a drawing analysis of the formal composition of three selected contemporary architectural projects in a period from 1992 to 2015. Each of the three building designs is studied with the same four-layer method of design analysis. In conjunction with this comparative analysis, a project specific method that reveals unique aspects of each design has been developed. The first case is OMA's unbuilt Jussieu design for two university libraries in Paris. In 1992 Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his collaborators at OMA proposed the Jussieu project at a turning point of the discipline, where new forms of architecture with landscape design strategies were being explored. Though this project has not been realised, this thesis makes it possible to describe the building in a guided walk-through. This visualisation of the design as it could have looked if built is also the specific analytical method chosen for this example. The second case, the Rolex Learning Centre at EPF Lausanne, has been clearly declared 'landscape' as architecture by its designers. This competition winning design from 2004 and opened in 2010 is the largest scale international building of Japanese Architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA). The specific analytical method used for this case is a visual space analysis of the project using 3D-isovists. The third case is the City of Culture of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela by American architect Peter Eisenman. This project was initially designed in 1999 in a process of layering - in principle, similar to the layer model analysis of this thesis. However, the four tenets of the thesis layer model - ground form, spatial form, metaphorical form and programmatic form - will alter the reading of this project. This execution of the giant public project of "City of Culture" was interrupted half-way in 2015, with great political difficulties fo Galicia. The specific analytical method used for this case is an experiment that uses the ruins of unbuilt architecture as the base for a landscape architectural design. This design of a temporary garden mimics the design principles of architect Peter Eisenman. This experiment shows that landscape strategies developed for the design of a building can be applied in reverse for designed landscapes. In conclusion, this thesis will compare the three case studies of architectural designs with each other. While some design instruments, strategies and methods are specific, others are commonly applied in several or all of the projects. In a broader scope, the analysis is transposed into the greater societal and theoretical realm to explore whether landscape design strategies change architecture. For the discipline of architecture in general, the thesis explores how far landscape could lead the profession further as a new concept to build a sustainable human environment. Evoking potential applications and the reach of landscape in architecture in the perspective of future development, the thesis ultimately discusses unexplored potentials for landscape design strategies in the architectural discipline