Overview
- Authors:
-
-
Christine Strothotte
-
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany
-
Thomas Strothotte
-
Faculty of Computer Science, Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany
Access this book
Other ways to access
About this book
Pictures are at the heart of how we communicate with computers, emblematic of our cur rent fascination with multimedia and web-based computing. Nevertheless, most of us know far less about pictures and the way in which they work than we know about the text that often accompanies them. In an attempt to understand pictures, perhaps the most fundamental question we can ask is, "What is a picture?" What is it that objects as di verse as icons, bar charts, paintings, and photographs have in common that makes us refer to all of them as pictures? And what is it about pictures that convinces us to use them instead of, or in addition to, text? We often talk about how pictures "depict" things. But, even the process of depiction seems to differ from one picture to another. On a computer, we may use a paint system to guide a virtual brush over the screen, a video camera to capture a live image, a spread sheet to automatically generate a corresponding bar chart, or a rendering system that models the interactions of synthetic lights, objects, and cameras. Is there some un derlying property that these processes all share? Computer scientists are used to thinking of pictures in terms of their representation: an array of pixels, a list or hierarchy of graphics primitives, or even a program written in a language such as PostScript.
Similar content being viewed by others
Table of contents (19 chapters)
-
-
Preliminaries
-
-
- Christine Strothotte, Thomas Strothotte
Pages 3-21
-
Fundamentals
-
-
- Christine Strothotte, Thomas Strothotte
Pages 25-42
-
- Christine Strothotte, Thomas Strothotte
Pages 43-62
-
- Christine Strothotte, Thomas Strothotte
Pages 63-79
-
- Christine Strothotte, Thomas Strothotte
Pages 81-98
-
Abstract-Graphical Pictures
-
-
- Christine Strothotte, Thomas Strothotte
Pages 101-111
-
- Christine Strothotte, Thomas Strothotte
Pages 113-125
-
- Christine Strothotte, Thomas Strothotte
Pages 127-146
-
- Christine Strothotte, Thomas Strothotte
Pages 147-170
-
Pictograms
-
Front Matter
Pages 171-171
-
- Christine Strothotte, Thomas Strothotte
Pages 173-190
-
- Christine Strothotte, Thomas Strothotte
Pages 191-203
-
- Christine Strothotte, Thomas Strothotte
Pages 205-213
-
- Christine Strothotte, Thomas Strothotte
Pages 215-224
-
Presentational Pictures
-
Front Matter
Pages 225-225
-
- Christine Strothotte, Thomas Strothotte
Pages 227-247
Authors and Affiliations
-
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany
Christine Strothotte
-
Faculty of Computer Science, Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany
Thomas Strothotte