Books about Interactivity from Amazon.com

Macromedia Flash is fast becoming the Web's most widely used platform for creating rich media with animation and motion graphics, but mastering Flash isn't easy. Most entry-level books teach through simple examples that concentrate on either animation or scripting, but rarely both together. To get the most from Flash 8, you not only need to be proficient in programming/interface design, you need the creativity for story telling and the artistic insights to design fluid animation.

Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity teaches Flash design rather than simply Flash itself. With a standalone series of walkthroughs and tutorials for Flash beginners coming from a graphics field, this book teaches Flash in the context of real-world projects. Rather than learn a Flash tool for the sake of it, you learn which areas of Flash are important, and which are less used, simply by seeing how typical content is actually created. And rather than a text-heavy approach, this graphically rich book leads you through hands-on examples by illustration.

Each project in the book starts with goals and broad sketches before moving to design and scripting. This helps you understand design intent-the why of the process-rather than just learning the interfaces and the how of it all. Along the way, you'll create Flash content that includes traditional animation techniques (as seen in full-length animated features), and ActionScript-based interactive animation, such as custom web site interface designs. You also learn how to combine both traditional animation techniques and ActionScript to create feature-rich Flash assets from the ground up.

Co-authored by educational developers with years of experience creating compelling content, interfaces, and applications, Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity offers a content-driven approach that is also inspiration-driven. You learn because you're accomplishing something tangible, not because you think you need to know how a tool works.

If you want to understand how various features of Flash come together to create a final end design, this book provides you with both the insight and the know-how.

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Price: $15.52 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Is there a significant difference in attitude between immersion in a game and immersion in a movie or novel? What are the new possibilities for representation offered by the emerging technology of virtual reality? As Marie-Laure Ryan demonstrates in Narrative as Virtual Reality, the questions raised by new, interactive technologies have their precursors and echoes in pre-electronic literary and artistic traditions. Formerly a culture of immersive ideals -- getting lost in a good book, for example -- we are becoming, Ryan claims, a culture more concerned with interactivity. Approaching the idea of virtual reality as a metaphor for total art, Narrative as Virtual Reality applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology of reading.

Ryan's analysis encompasses both traditional literary narratives and the new textual genres made possible by the electronic revolution of the past few years, such as hypertext, interactive movies and drama, digital installation art, and computer role-playing games. Interspersed among the book's chapters are several "interludes" that focus exclusively on either key literary texts that foreshadow what we now call "virtual reality," including those of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Ignatius de Loyola, Calvino, and science-fiction author Neal Stephenson, or recent efforts to produce interactive art forms, like the hypertext "novel" Twelve Blue, by Michael Joyce, and I'm Your Man, an interactive movie. As Ryan considers the fate of traditional narrative patterns in digital culture, she revisits one of the central issues in modern literary theory -- the opposition between a presumably passive reading that is taken over by the world a text represents and an active, deconstructive reading that imaginatively participates in the text's creation.

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Price: $22.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Push your creative ideas to the next level in content delivery.
Use real and simulated 3D space in your Flash games and interactive systems.

3D possibilities offer an untapped creative approach to thinking and designing with Flash. Tap into this medium by:
* Creating reusable templates to reduce costs and cycle time for project development.
* Experimenting with author-provided interactive examples that demonstrate a broad range of Flash applications from website to DVD/CD-ROM delivery.
* Practicing the real-world project techniques presented by the authors in full color.
* Expanding your horizons with experimental projects.

Jim Ver Hague is a professor of Computer Graphics Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He has more than 30 years' experience in the field of computer graphics and has lectured, consulted, and conducted workshops internationally in the fields of multimedia, electronic publishing, computer-aided information design, and computer art and sculpture.

Chris Jackson is a computer graphics designer and Associate Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. Chris has an extensive background in graphic design, printing and interactive multimedia. His professional work has received over 25 distinguished national and international awards for online communication.

User Level: Intermediate

Key Features:
* Techniques for creating reusable templates that reduce costs and cycle time for project development.
* A companion CD-ROM that includes an artists' gallery of example projects and project media for real-world exercises and tutorials.
* A balance of practical and experimental projects designed to teach and stretch your skills..
Price: $29.07 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This paperback version of Brenda Laurel's 1991 hardcover classic features a new chapter that takes the reader through virtual reality and beyond to a new level of human computer interaction that is genuinely transforming. Provocative, practical, and thoroughly enjoyable reading, this book presents a new theory of human-computer activity..
Price: $21.25 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Through five releases of Macromedia's industry-standard Web graphics software program, James Mohler has become the indispensable resource for those looking to master the power of Flash. Flash:8 Graphics, Animation & Interactivity delivers Mohler's widely praised hands-on approach to learning for the newest version of Macromedia® Flash. Exercises and examples in the book, and the on back-of-the book CD, combined with step-by-step explanations, provide the best of both worlds-not just telling you how flash works, but showing you as well. For those new to flash, there are plenty of exercises designed to quickly get users up to speed quickly. Intermediate and advanced Flash users will find new exercises that demonstrate the latest features of version 8 as well as a valuable series of examples that illustrate some of the more complex elements of the software. The book features chapters on graphic techniques, bitmap graphic integration, typography and text, symbols, libraries, sound, animation, interactive techniques-plus an essential introduction to Flash's internal scripting language, Action Script..
Price: $12.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $70.23 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Internet Marketing: Readings and Online Resources provides students with an introduction to internet marketing and the informative foundation they need to maneuver through the world of “interactive marketing”. This term describes how marketers are using the Internet to decrease transaction costs, improve brand image, enhance customer relations, and create entirely new distribution channels for products and services. Richardson mixes a collection of current readings to introduce the student to fundamental concepts of internet marketing organized in a traditional principles of marketing approach. Traditional marketing concepts are still valid; what changes in the internet environment are the applications..
Price: $9.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

What is Live Action Roleplaying? How does it work? How is it different from other forms of roleplaying? How can I run a LARP of my own? -- Answers plus basic LARP info, and fun characters!.
Price: $9.49 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Aquatic Ecosystems explains the interplay between various movements of matter and energy through ecosystems mediated by Dissolved Organic Matter. This book provides information on how much DOM there is in a particular aquatic ecosystem and where it originates. It explains whether the DOM composition varies from time to time and place to place. It also details how DOM becomes incorporated into microbial food webs, and gives a better, clarifying, understanding to its significance of DOM.

Dissolved Organic Matter (called DOM) is incredibly important in all aquatic ecosystems. Although it might seem that logs and leaves are more important, in fact the DOM is more crucial because the DOM is in a form that is available for use by all the organisms living in the the water. Furthermore, DOM influences complex food webs by mediating the availability of aquatic nutrients, metals, salts and minerals. DOM also affects water clarity, which of course has alters the way animals and plants live and feed in the water.
There are many ways to study DOM and this book focuses on several central questions. How much DOM is there in a particular aquatic ecosytem? Where does it come from? Does the composition of the DOM vary from time to time and place to palce? How does DOM become incorporated into microbial food webs, which are the basis of plant, invertebrate and vertebrate food webs? How can the answers to these and other questions about DOM be considered together so that a better understanding of the significance of DOM can emerge?.
Price: $96.19 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This digital document is an article from Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine, published by Parachute Contemporary Art on April 1, 1997. The length of the article is 1576 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Interactivity and real time-envy: an interview with (Elizabeth) Diller + (Ricardo) Scofidio.
Author: Jim Drobnick
Publication:Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine (Magazine/Journal)
Date: April 1, 1997
Publisher: Parachute Contemporary Art
Issue: 86 Page: 10-13

Distributed by Thomson Gale.
Price: $5.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]