Bøker utgitt av LAP Lambert Academic Publishing

Hydrogel are networked structures of polymer crosslinked to each other and surrounded by an aqueous solution. The polymer chains contain acidic or basic groups bound to them. The acidic groups on the chains deprotonate at high pH, whereas the basic groups protonate at low pH. In the presence of an aqueous solution, the polymer chains absorb water and the association, dissociation and binding of various ions to polymer chains causes the hydrogel to swell. The swelling and shrinking properties of hydrogels are currently being exploited in a number of applications including control of microfluidic flow, muscle-like actuators filtration/separation, and drug delivery. The structure and properties of hydrogels are similar to many biological tissues such as cartilage and the corneal stroma in the eye.

This book introduces a new approach ¿ Parametric Design Procedures (PDPs) ¿ which combines the techniques of Design Procedures and Parametric Modeling to address the limitations of existing systems. PDPs use parameters (e.g. initial shapes, variables, operations, numbers and relationships) as inputs and calculate them through encapsulated mathematical processes to generate and explore solutions for the design problem being considered. PDPs provide a powerful and creative method to immediately compose a parameterized schema that can be used for design explorations. This offers possibilities to explore a particular design instance after a model is constrained through the generation of an infinite number of design instances which can be considered in the evolution of parametric design instances. The rational for, and features of PDPs are described. The viability of this approach is explored through a prototype implementation in Grasshopper. The brief for an architectural design competition is used as the basis for the prototype development. The implementation issues around PDPs are discussed and the paper concludes with recommendations for further research.

This work proposes a real-time markerless strategy to track human full-body movements for a pseudo 3D motion reconstruction using a single standard camera, at a low computational cost. This method allows a continuous depth warping of the tracked body parts based on pose recognition, and obtains realistic reconstructions when the considered actions are already known. A strategy to recognize combined actions, based on proper database storage of human motion patterns and poses, is also described. Experimental results show that taking advantage of the reconstructed poses it can be easily adapted to the different anthropometries of users without changing the known databases. This strategy allows more complex interactions between the subject and computer in human-computer interaction applications, as motor actions can easily be recognized in a wider set of poses, than those offered by holistic procedures.