How digital technology is profoundly renewing our sense of what is real and how we perceive. Digital technologies are not just tools; they are structures of perception. They determine the way in which the world appears to us. For nearly half a century, technology has provided us with perceptions coming from an unknown world. The digital beings that emerge from our screens and our interfaces disrupt the notion of what we experience as real, thereby leading us to relearn how to perceive. In Being and the Screen, Stéphane Vial provides a philosophical analysis of technology in general, and of digital technologies in particular, that relies on the observation of experience (phenomenology) and the history of technology (epistemology). He explains that technology is no longer separate from ourselves—if it ever was. Rather, we are as much a part of the machine as the machine is part of us. Vial argues that the so-called difference between the real and the virtual does not exist and never has. We are living in a hybrid environment—which is both digital and nondigital, online and offline. With this book, Vial endows philosophical meaning to what we experience daily in our digital age. In A Short Treatise on Design, Vial offers a concise introduction to the discipline of design—not a history book, but a book built of philosophical problems, developing a theory of the effect of design. This book is published with the support of the University of Nîmes, France.

This book focuses on the principles and technology of environmental perception in unmanned systems. With the rapid development of a new generation of information technologies such as automatic control and information perception, a new generation of robots and unmanned systems will also take on new importance. This book first reviews the development of autonomous systems and subsequently introduces readers to the technical characteristics and main technologies of the sensor. Lastly, it addresses aspects including autonomous path planning, intelligent perception and autonomous control technology under uncertain conditions. For the first time, the book systematically introduces the core technology of autonomous system information perception.

An award-winning journalist investigates how scientists and citizens around the world are re-tooling our senses-and what their discoveries are teaching us about the nature and future of human perception How do we know what's real? That's not a trick question: sensory science is increasingly finding that we don't perceive reality: we create it through perception. In We Have the Technology, science writer Kara Platoni guides us through the latest developments in the science of sensory perception. We Have the Technology introduces us to researchers who are changing the way we experience the world, whether creating scents that stimulate the memories of Alzheimer's patients, constructing virtual limbs that approximate a sense of touch, or building augmented reality labs that prepare soldiers for the battlefield. These diverse investigations not only explain previously elusive aspects of human experience, but offer tantalizing glimpses into a future when we can expand, control, and enhance our senses as never before. A fascinating tour of human capability and scientific ingenuity, We Have the Technology offers essential insights into the nature and possibilities of human experience.

Promoting the design, application and evaluation of visually and electrically effective LED light sources and luminaires for general indoor lighting as well as outdoor and vehicle lighting, this book combines the knowledge of LED lighting technology with human perceptual aspects for lighting scientists and engineers. After an introduction to the human visual system and current radiometry, photometry and color science, the basics of LED chip and phosphor technology are described followed by specific issues of LED radiometry and the optical, thermal and electric modeling of LEDs. This is supplemented by the relevant practical issues of pulsed LEDs, remote phosphor LEDs and the aging of LED light sources. Relevant human visual aspects closely related to LED technology are described in detail for the photopic and the mesopic range of vision, including color rendering, binning, whiteness, Circadian issues, as well as flicker perception, brightness, visual performance, conspicuity and disability glare. The topic of LED luminaires is discussed in a separate chapter, including retrofit LED lamps, LED-based road and street luminaires and LED luminaires for museum and school lighting. Specific sections are devoted to the modularity of LED luminaires, their aging and the planning and evaluation methods of new LED installations. The whole is rounded off by a summary and a look towards future developments.

This book presents a survey of past and recent developments on human walking in virtual environments with an emphasis on human self-motion perception, the multisensory nature of experiences of walking, conceptual design approaches, current technologies, and applications. The use of Virtual Reality and movement simulation systems is becoming increasingly popular and more accessible to a wide variety of research fields and applications. While, in the past, simulation technologies have focused on developing realistic, interactive visual environments, it is becoming increasingly obvious that our everyday interactions are highly multisensory. Therefore, investigators are beginning to understand the critical importance of developing and validating locomotor interfaces that can allow for realistic, natural behaviours. The book aims to present an overview of what is currently understood about human perception and performance when moving in virtual environments and to situate it relative to the broader scientific and engineering literature on human locomotion and locomotion interfaces. The contents include scientific background and recent empirical findings related to biomechanics, self-motion perception, and physical interactions. The book also discusses conceptual approaches to multimodal sensing, display systems, and interaction for walking in real and virtual environments. Finally, it will present current and emerging applications in areas such as gait and posture rehabilitation, gaming, sports, and architectural design.

This book takes the interface – or rather to interface, a process rather than a discrete object or location – as a concept emblematic of our contemporary embodied relationship with technological artefacts. The fundamental question addressed by this book is: How can we understand what it means to perceive or act upon the world as a body–artefact assemblage? Black works to clarify the role of artefacts of all kinds in human perception and action, then considers the ways in which new digital technologies can expand and transform this capacity to change our mode of engagement with our environment. Throughout, the discussion is grounded in specific technologies – some already familiar and some still in development (e.g. new virtual reality and brain–machine interface technologies, natural user interfaces, etc.). In order to develop a detailed, generalizable theory of how we interface with technology, Black assembles an analytical toolkit from a number of different disciplines, including media theory, ethology, clinical psychology, cultural theory, philosophy, science and technology studies, cultural history, aesthetics and neuroscience.

This study investigates the idea and practice of liveness in modern music.. The book argues that liveness itself emerges from dynamic tensions inherent in mediated musical contexts--tensions between music as an acoustic human utterance, and musical sound as something produced or altered by machines.

In The Senses of Modernism, Sara Danius develops a radically new theoretical and historical understanding of high modernism. The author closely analyzes Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and James Joyce's Ulysses as narratives of the sweeping changes that affected high and low culture in the age of technological reproduction. In her discussion of the years from 1880 to 1930, Danius proposes that the high-modernist aesthetic is inseparable from a technologically mediated crisis of the senses. She reveals the ways in which categories of perceiving and knowing are realigned when technological devices are capable of reproducing sense data. Sparked by innovations such as chronophotography, phonography, radiography, cinematography, and technologies of speed, this sudden shift in perceptual abilities had an effect on all arts of the time.Danius explores how perception, notably sight and hearing, is staged in the three most significant modern novels in German, French, and British literature. The Senses of Modernism connects technological change and formal innovation to transform the study of modernist aesthetics. Danius questions the longstanding acceptance of a binary relationship between high and low culture and describes the complicated relationship between modernism and technology, challenging the conceptual divide between a technological culture and a more properly aesthetic one.

"This is a book about what the science of perception can tell us about visualization. There is a gold mine of information about how we see to be found in more than a century of work by vision researchers. The purpose of this book is to extract from that large body of research literature those design principles that apply to displaying information effectively"--

Essays examining the relationships between culture, film, and the audience around the turn of the twentieth century. The current digital revolution has sparked a renewed interest in the origins and trajectory of modern media, particularly in the years around 1900 when the technology was rapidly developing. This collection aims to broaden our understanding of early cinema as a significant innovation in media history. Joining traditional scholarship with fresh insights from a variety of disciplines, this book explains the aesthetic and institutional characteristics in early cinema within the context of the contemporary media landscape. It also addresses transcultural developments such as scientific revolutions, industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, as well as differing attitudes toward modernization. Film 1900 is an important reassessment of early cinema’s position in cultural history. “The capable Ligensa and Kreimeier invited a coterie of renowned Continental scholars and thinkers to reflect on issues of modernity and cinema by harking back to the fin de siècle. . . . Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.” —T. Lindval, Choice