The problem concerning this investigation is determining some of the possibilities of combining painting, architectonic constructions, and shadows produced by the controlled lighting of the structure. Chapter I is a brief history of experimentations in these areas during the twentieth century. This history assists in defining what has been done in the past, and reveals some directions for the future. Chapter II concerns three areas of study 1) the selection of the constructed forms mounted on canvas panels, 2) the lighting experimentations and their results, 3) the use of painted shadows to create an ambiguous pattern. This research concludes that a synthesis of these various art elements is not only possible, but aesthetically pleasing.

Creation of visually-pleasing images has always been one of the main goals of computer graphics. Two important components are necessary to achieve this goal --- artists who design visual aspects of an image (such as materials or lighting) and sophisticated algorithms that render the image. Traditionally, rendering has been of greater interest to researchers, while the design part has always been deemed as secondary. This has led to many inefficiencies, as artists, in order to create a stunning image, are often forced to resort to the traditional, creativity-baring, pipelines consisting of repeated rendering and parameter tweaking. Our work shifts the attention away from the rendering problem and focuses on the design. We propose to combine non-physical editing with real-time feedback and provide artists with efficient ways of designing complex visual aspects such as global illumination or all-frequency shadows. We conform to existing pipelines by inserting our editing components into existing stages, hereby making editing of visual aspects an inherent part of the design process. Many of the examples showed in this work have been, until now, extremely hard to achieve. The non-physical aspect of our work enables artists to express themselves in more creative ways, not limited by the physical parameters of current renderers. Real-time feedback allows artists to immediately see the effects of applied modifications and compatibility with existing workflows enables easy integration of our algorithms into production pipelines.

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In America alone, 19 million people live with depression. Untreated depression is the leading cause of suicide in the United States and the third leading cause of death between 18-25 year olds. The aim of the project was guided based on the idea that we could take sadness as a manifestation in order to allow the possibility of controlling and manipulating it.  The idea was based on a well documented understanding that melancholia creates a permeable boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness.  In melancholia there is an internalization of behaviors that insulate and isolate the individual. With this level of introspection also comes an underlying gift of deep passion, curiosity and cognition.  This gift brings a deep understanding to the workings of the world.  It is in this dual reality that lies a realm of complexity and possibility.  This understanding of depression led me to believe in how powerful and how necessary the simple yet essential feeling of hope was. The concept of hope seems like an illusion but sometimes it\'s the only thing you have.  The hope is what keeps you going and allows a tangible identity to sanity.  How can architecture reflect hope and how can a space help the weary hearted? These questions pleaded for answers and this thesis is a result of the search.  The search for a better place in our minds. The desire for a hope that we are not prisoners to our sadness The quest for answers laid its journey on a cliff edge on the Olmsted Island of Great Falls, MD ; a site amplified with majestic soaring views and soundscapes of water and nature that accentuate the program of an alternative mental therapy retreat. / Master of Architecture

I am interested in family secrets and the rules and mores that may constrain family behavior or adversely affect a member’s destiny. I make work that looks askance at the efforts to hide from the world those events or secrets that reflect badly on a family. I look at the places where I have discovered some of them: family furniture and objects around the house, which can shed, metaphorically, the secrets and stories that are part of family tradition. I focus light on the lives of my uncelebrated ancestors and bring them, however briefly, into the collective consciousness.

Shadows in indoor scenarios are usually characterized with multiple light sources that produce complex shadow patterns of a single object. Without removing shadow, the foreground object tends to be erroneously segmented. The inconsistent hue and intensity of shadows make automatic removal a challenging task. In this thesis, a dynamic thresholding and transfer learning-based method for removing shadows is proposed. The method suppresses light shadows with a dynamically computed threshold and removes dark shadows using an online learning strategy that is built upon a base classifier trained with manually annotated examples and refined with the automatically identified examples in the new videos. Experimental results demonstrate that despite variation of lighting conditions in videos our proposed method is able to adapt to the videos and remove shadows effectively. The sensitivity of shadow detection changes slightly with different confidence levels used in example selection for classifier retraining and high confidence level usually yields better performance with less retraining iterations.

This essay analyses Burnt Shadows (2009) by Kamila Shamsie from a postcolonial feminist perspective, with a focus on agency of women, representation and re-presentation, and cultural stereotypes. The degree of agency in the main characters Hiroko, Elizabeth and Kim is discussed, followed by an analysis of the re-presentation of Indian, Pakistani and Arab Muslim women characters in the text, with a focus on homogenisation and voice. Moreover, suggestions of how to teach Burnt Shadows with a postcolonial (and) feminist lens within the course English 6 in the Swedish upper secondary school EFL classroom are discussed. It is concluded that Hiroko, Elizabeth and Kim have voice and agency to various degrees. Moreover, it is stated that Indian, Pakistani and Arab Muslim women are re-presented in a stereotypical and homogenising way, and their lack of voice obstruct the possibilities of regarding these characters from a contextual, historical, and cultural perspective. The pedagogical framework concludes that Burnt Shadows can be used to study postcolonial feminist theory in the EFL classroom. Given that the teacher is open-minded, inclusive and objective, the teaching can pursue equality and solidarity in line with the fundamental values of the Swedish upper secondary school.

Point-based rendering methods have proven to be effective for the display of large point cloud surface models. For a realistic visualization of the models, transparency and shadows are essential features. We propose a method for point cloud rendering with transparency and shadows at interactive rates. Our approach does not require any global or local surface reconstruction method, but operates directly on the point cloud. All passes are executed in image space and no pre-computation steps are required. The underlying technique for our approach is a depth peeling method for point cloud surface representations. Having detected a sorted sequence of surface layers, they can be blended front to back with given opacity values to obtain renderings with transparency. These computation steps achieve interactive frame rates. For renderings with shadows, we determine a point cloud shadow texture that stores for each point of a point cloud whether it is lit by a given light source. The extraction of the layer of lit points is obtained using the depth peeling technique, again. For the shadow texture computation, we also apply a Monte-Carlo integration method to approximate light from an area light source, leading to soft shadows. Shadow computations for point light sources are executed at interactive frame rates. Shadow computations for area light sources are performed at interactive or near-interactive frame rates depending on the approximation quality.

<p>Ambient Occlusion är en teknik för ambient ljussättning i digitala tredimensionella scener. Sådana scener ljussätts vanligtvis med en konstant mängd ambient ljus på samtliga ytor oberoende av ytornas vinkel och position gentemot olika ljuskällor i scenen. Detta ger ett platt och kalt intryck och utan vidare ljussättningstekniker är det ytterst svårt att urskönja detaljer i scenen. Ambient Occlusion åthjälper detta genom att reducera mängden ambient ljus i vissa delar av scenen. Ambient ljus är en enkel approximation av det reflekterade diffusa ljuset som antas nå nästan överallt i scenen. Genom att sänka det ambienta ljuset på punkter i scenen med tät eller täckande geometri så ger Ambient Occlusion ett intryck av att det sekundära diffusa ljuset ej når dessa platser. Pappret undersöker en äldre variant av Ambient Occlusion där mängden ambient ljus beräknas statiskt för en scen och sparas i texturer. Vidare undersöks nyare metoder där mängden ambient ljus beräknas dynamiskt på den renderade scenen i Pixel Shaders. Det senare tillvägagångssättet kallas Image Based Ambient Occlusion eller Screen Space Ambient Occlusion. Detta nya tillvägagångssätt jämförs mot den traditionella angreppsvinkeln med förberäknade texturer. Teknikerna utvärderas och jämförs mot varandra i avseende på tids- och minneskomplexitet, enkelhet och visuellt resultat utöver specifika egenskaper för de enskilda teknikerna. Arbetets resultat beskrivs i slutet av rapporten. I resultatet presenteras hur shaderteknikerna pga sina brister inte är applicerbara i alla scener.</p>

Submitted by Suelen Reis (suziy.ellen@gmail.com) on 2013-05-24T14:33:36Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese Joao Quadro Neto.pdf: 961182 bytes, checksum: a6dd4ffb334336aa87127ac126c5c2db (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2013-05-24T14:33:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese Joao Quadro Neto.pdf: 961182 bytes, checksum: a6dd4ffb334336aa87127ac126c5c2db (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006 / Este estudo se propôs a investigar, dentre as suas questões norteadoras, aquelas ligadas ao espaço que as redes sociais de comunicação informal – RSCIs - ocupam dentro das organizações industriais. Assume como hipótese que as RSCIs ajudam os seus integrantes a melhor entenderem o ambiente organizacional, promovem a interação social e, por conseqüência, estimulam o sentimento de pertença dos indivíduos, facilitando, dessa forma, o processo de comprometimento deles com a organização. Pertença é entendida no estudo como um sentimento em que o indivíduo assume que este lugar lhe pertence, de tal forma, que acredita ser possível participar dele e que vale à pena interferir na sua rotina e nos seus destinos. O estudo admitiu como premissa que as “sombras organizacionais” e a “disfuncionalidade comportamental” do seu corpo gerencial são variáveis que não somente contribuem para as “incongruências” entre o discurso e a prática nas organizações, mas também, influenciam na formação de traços patológicos na personalidade de uma organização. Dentro da premissa o estudo assume também que estes traços patológicos e as revoluções porque passam as organizações influenciam no grau de intensidade das RSCIs nesses ambientes. Para a confirmação da hipótese o autor se valeu do método fenomenológico, colocando em suspensão os valores declarados por duas empresas industriais com diferentes estilos gerenciais, os valores percebidos pelos seus empregados e a configuração da comunicação informal naquelas empresas, de modo a poder mapear as possíveis “incongruências” existentes e suas conseqüências sobre o desempenho das redes sociais de comunicação informal. Como apoio ao estudo utilizou-se de pesquisas quantitativas estratificadas com empregados e gerentes das referidas empresas, cujos resultados foram analisados num formato de estudo de caso. Esta metodologia revelou a coerência da premissa e a confirmação da hipótese. Como resultado desta investigação, o estudo propõe um modelo para construção de uma comunicação interna mais integrada, que possa manter um convívio mais harmônico entre a comunicação formal e a informal dentro das organizações industriais. / Salvador