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At first I thought the teapot focus at SIGGRAPH indicated the presence of kindred spirits. Surely, with all those teapots around, there must be somebody who wanted to sit down and have a nice cup of tea? Or maybe just somebody to stand around and drink bad tea made with lukewarm water in paper cups? No. It was all coffee drinkers and flashing lights. The teapots were purely symbolic. The canonical teapot was bottomless. (I don't mean some waiter put it on a table and offered to refill it forever. Somebody drew it for an example of a complicated-yet-recognizable shape to test his computer graphics program on, decades ago, and he only drew the top and sides.) So the CGI-geek community has decades of in-jokes about teapots and a bunch of representations of teapots (*), but no actual tea.
Before I had any idea of this context, I saw a big picture of the Boston skyline, done entirely in teapots of different colors. They had a magnifying glass hanging next to it, so everyone could appreciate the teapotness of it. It reminded me of making pictures with text filling in the space. When it's done with asci on usenet or some other text-only situation, it looked like a response to a technical constraint. When it's done with biblical texts written by hand in hebrew, it looked devotional. Millions of teapots? It looked like OCD. Now that I can recognize the in-joke, I'm not sure if I can really appreciate it as a joke, or if I just want to stare at such remarkable evidence of obsession, like eating a bicycle.
I saw something in the poster session about "Designing No-Surprise Teapots." (I thought Christoph von Tycowicz from Bremen was randomly teapot-obsessed, but now it's clear that he's just another person playing with the in-joke.) His research is about an integral function, the Tea Flow Rate (TFR), which can be calculated as a line integral, "intersecting the tesselated teapot body with the tea-level plane." The poster concludes that the function is not dynamic, so "results are valid only for cautious pouring," and thus he claims further research is needed.
There was also a very impressive origami teapot that looked full-sized and fully detailed, including the lid. It was made from a single big sheet of paper, with a diagram next to it showing how it was folded. And there was a little display case with about a dozen tea-tins (with "Renderman tea"), each with a different color rapid-prototype walking teapot (designed with Renderman, of course) perched on top. I did not die of cuteness overload, despite the lack of actual tea. Nor did I die of strobe overload, though that was much more of a near thing, in an exhibit hall with Industrial Light and Magic, Pixar, Disney, Rhythm and Hues, and a bunch of people demonstrating ways to transform human actors into cartoons.
Before I had any idea of this context, I saw a big picture of the Boston skyline, done entirely in teapots of different colors. They had a magnifying glass hanging next to it, so everyone could appreciate the teapotness of it. It reminded me of making pictures with text filling in the space. When it's done with asci on usenet or some other text-only situation, it looked like a response to a technical constraint. When it's done with biblical texts written by hand in hebrew, it looked devotional. Millions of teapots? It looked like OCD. Now that I can recognize the in-joke, I'm not sure if I can really appreciate it as a joke, or if I just want to stare at such remarkable evidence of obsession, like eating a bicycle.
I saw something in the poster session about "Designing No-Surprise Teapots." (I thought Christoph von Tycowicz from Bremen was randomly teapot-obsessed, but now it's clear that he's just another person playing with the in-joke.) His research is about an integral function, the Tea Flow Rate (TFR), which can be calculated as a line integral, "intersecting the tesselated teapot body with the tea-level plane." The poster concludes that the function is not dynamic, so "results are valid only for cautious pouring," and thus he claims further research is needed.
There was also a very impressive origami teapot that looked full-sized and fully detailed, including the lid. It was made from a single big sheet of paper, with a diagram next to it showing how it was folded. And there was a little display case with about a dozen tea-tins (with "Renderman tea"), each with a different color rapid-prototype walking teapot (designed with Renderman, of course) perched on top. I did not die of cuteness overload, despite the lack of actual tea. Nor did I die of strobe overload, though that was much more of a near thing, in an exhibit hall with Industrial Light and Magic, Pixar, Disney, Rhythm and Hues, and a bunch of people demonstrating ways to transform human actors into cartoons.
