The night the first Mars Exploration Rover landed, the engineering team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena excitedly announced: "We have excellent quaternions for the rover!" This meant that through the application of a technique developed 160 years before they were able to determine the precise orientation of the spacecraft on Mars after traveling millions of miles through space. Quaternions are widely used in computer graphics, simulations, Hollywood special effects, computer games, and space travel, but they are conceptually very hard to grasp. The computer graphics community has a general familiarity with quaternions and their uses, but there are still many unresolved issues and controversies with them. And the subject mystifies many new engineers, such as game developers who lack a background in mathematics. While there are books that approach quaternions from a mathematician's perspective, this is the first that will give a professional developer an intuitive understanding of quaternions through visual representations. Visualizing Quaternions introduces new developers to this powerful technique and will provide the definitive explanation to those who have been struggling to use them.
1558600210LangtextGame development is still in its infancy, but games are poised for a major evolution: Ready to move from mostly plot-driven stories to more character based ones. The problem is that the principles of sophisticated character design and interaction are not widely understood in the game development community. And gender and cultural issues within the game genre are growing in importance. Katherine Isbister has spent 10 years examining what makes interactions with computer characters useful and engaging to different audiences. The key is to understand what's memorable, exciting, useful, and engaging to the participant about real-life social interactions, and applying that to character design. Game designers who create great characters often make use of these principles without realizing it. This book gives game design professionals and other designers a framework for how social roles and perceptual manipulations function, so that they are more aware of what they are doing when they design characters, and why it works.