For more than a millennium, Islamic artists and craftsmen have used geometric patterns to decorate buildings, cloth, pottery, and other artifacts. Many of these patterns were ‘wallpaper’ patterns — they were planar patterns that repeated in two different directions. Recently related patterns have also been drawn on the Platonic solids, which can conceptually be projected outward onto their circumscribing spheres, thus utilizing a second of the three ‘classical geometries’. In this paper, Douglas Dunham extends this process by exhibiting repeating Islamic patterns in hyperbolic geometry, the third classical geometry.

Read More: Hyperbolic Islamic Patterns, by Douglas Dunham

Islamic star patterns are a beautiful and highly geometric art form. Many analyses have been done of their complex structure and symmetries. In this paper, Craig S. Kaplan picks up one line of analysis based on placing stars and rosettes in a formation dictated by a tiling of the plane, and develops a software implementation of the technique. He then discusses the construction of the designs and shows some computer-generated results.

Read More: Computer Generated Islamic Star Patterns, by Craig S. Kaplan

In this paper, the authors present a case study centred on the virtual restitution and virtual life simulation of a highly complex and endangered heritage edifice: the church of Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul, Turkey. The paper aims to describe the techniques used in order to achieve a photo-realistic simulation of the selected space and its characters, as well as to point out the challenges and solutions that such a work implies at different stages in production. Most of these issues are mainly focused on the reconstruction of the architecture of the site, but in order to achieve an accurate simulation the social aspect must not be forgotten.

Read More: Virtual Hagia Sophia, by Foni, Papagiannakis and Magnenat-Thalmann