(BQ) Part 2 book "Programming interactivity" has contents: Bitmaps and pixels, physical feedback, protocols and communication, graphics and opengl, detection and gestures, movement and location, spaces and environments, further resources,.and other contents. | CHAPTER 10 Bitmaps and Pixels In this chapter, you’ll learn about video and images and how your computer processes them, and you’ll learn about how to display them, manipulate them, and save them to files. Why are we talking about video and images together? Well, both video and photos are bitmaps comprised of pixels. A pixel is the color data that will be displayed at one physical pixel in your computer monitor. A bitmap is an array of pixel data. Video is several different things with quite distinct meanings: it is light from a projector or screen, it is a series of pixels, it is a representation of what was happening somewhere, or it is a constructed image. Another way to phrase this is that you can also think of video as being both file format and medium. A video can be something on a computer screen that someone is looking at, it can be data, it can be documentation, it can be a surveillance view onto a real place, it can be an abstraction, or it can be something fictional. It is always two or more of these at once because when you’re dealing with video on a computer, and especially when you’re dealing with that video in code, the video is always a piece of data. It is always a stream of color information that is reassembled into frames by a video player application and then displayed on the screen. Video is also something else as well, because it is a screen, a display, or perhaps an image. That screen need not be a standard white projection area; it can be a building, a pool of water, smoke, or something that conceals its nature as video and makes use of it only as light. A picture has a lot of the same characteristics. A photograph is, as soon as you digitize it, a chunk of data on a disk or in the memory of your computer that, when turned into pixel data to be drawn to the screen, becomes something else. What that something else is determines how your users will use the images and how they will understand them. A picture in a viewer is something to be .
