Didn't realise it was a long standing graphics in joke. Reading this took me back 20 years to my time as an AVS/Express developer. AVS used the teapot as a standard object for testing geometry pipelines.
> Back in his lab, he entered the sketched coordinates—called bézier
> control points, first used in the design of automobile bodies—on a
> Tektronix storage tube, an early computer memory.
Urg. Not a ‘memory’ in the computer sense, not being readable by the computer. What this means is that he used a Tektronix graphics terminal that had a self-persisting CRT display.¹
Way back (well, just shy of a decade ago) in my CompSci Signal and Image Processing course I got to know this teapot very, very well. Even created a 3-dimensional solar system of orbiting teapots that mimicked the exact orbits and rotations of the planets. Think I posted it on GitHub somewhere, too.
Yes, the UofU High School Ccomputing Institute [1]. I was accepted in '96 but already working a summer job in research park at the time (at a company w/ a commercial NURBS package) and didn't ever build a model. The coolest part is they would 3D print your model long before it being the commodity that it is today.
It'd be interesting to see a follow-up on the HSCI alumni and where they are now.
I was in 2002, the last class I think. In fact, I can't find any reference anymore to the later classes. It used to be maintained, but it's disappeared.
I also recently noticed that websites historically hosted on home.utah.edu were removed. I was going to find my old model (a model of Escher's Belvedere) but it's now gone.
Yes, 2002 was the last year. Prof. Dave Hanscom ran the HSCI from 1990 to 2002 [1].
I checked the Wayback Machine (archive.org), but unfortunately it doesn't have those pages mirrored. It's very sad that this history seems to be getting lost. At least one prestigious alumni (HSCI '92) that of I'm aware of is Berkeley Prof. Alexei Efros [2].
Awesome model! It's definitely one of the best ones I've seen from that program.
Interesting. I think he must be the son of the physics professor of the same name at the U (My BS was in Applied Physics at the U)
I think some of the links historically were also under ece.utah.edu. I might be able to find some other direct links on a few older computers which might still be in the wayback machine.
Other highlights include the working Babbage Engine, with a rather good lecture.
Antihighlights include the otherwise excellent display on the history of integrated circuits, sponsored by Intel, which doesn't mention ARM in any way anywhere...
The museum's totally worth a look if you're there.
To be "fair" (?), the opposite of Intel in this context isn't ARM but the sum total of IC fabs and designs done outside Intel, of which ARM is a small part.
In the precursor Boston Computer Museum, they had the Newell teapot on a turntable, with a computer display next to it showing a rotating computer graphic version turning at the same speed. I thought it was a pretty clever display.
I had the privilege of working g with Martin for a while once. The guy is one of those brilliant folks who is also incredibly humble, friendly, and happy to teach things to newbies. And he's really funny.
Also of note: Around the same time, University of Utah students created the first ever computer graphics generated picture that looks like its physical model: Marsha Sutherland's (Ivan Sutherland's wife) VW Bug [1].
The VW was hand measured by Sutherland's students: Jim Clark (of SGI/Netscape fame), Bui-Tui Phong (of Phong shading fame), Raphel Rom (of Catmull-Rom spline fame), and Robert McDermott (of Vegreville Egg fame). (I just listed some highlights of careers, they all accomplished much more!)
A first hand account of the model creation is preserved by Mr. McDermott on page 7 of the Fall 2003 edition of The Utah Teapot [2] (the aptly named University of Utah School of Computing quarterly newsletter).
The CS Dept. at the U of Utah has such a storied history, especially rich in fundamental computer graphics research [3]. Growing up in proximity to it definitely shaped my career path.
53 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] thread¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-view_bistable_storage_t...
Edit: Teapot on a Tektronix 4014: https://youtu.be/bZOrL7f1-kE
http://pixartimes.com/2013/08/01/video-a-look-at-pixars-coll...
alpha_1 was a system going back to the 1980 designed specifically for modeling with NURBS: https://www.cs.utah.edu/gdc/projects/alpha1/help/man/html/in...
It'd be interesting to see a follow-up on the HSCI alumni and where they are now.
[1] http://www.cs.utah.edu/~rma/hci/cs/hsci.html
I also recently noticed that websites historically hosted on home.utah.edu were removed. I was going to find my old model (a model of Escher's Belvedere) but it's now gone.
edit:
my model: http://imgur.com/VqPVSAj
I checked the Wayback Machine (archive.org), but unfortunately it doesn't have those pages mirrored. It's very sad that this history seems to be getting lost. At least one prestigious alumni (HSCI '92) that of I'm aware of is Berkeley Prof. Alexei Efros [2].
Awesome model! It's definitely one of the best ones I've seen from that program.
[1] http://www.cs.utah.edu/~hanscom/
[2] http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~efros/
I think some of the links historically were also under ece.utah.edu. I might be able to find some other direct links on a few older computers which might still be in the wayback machine.
Yes, the final captures of hsci all say "page not found" (soft 404), but the earlier ones are fine.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_bunny
https://goo.gl/photos/quo8W9BE75VQqkmr6
Other highlights include the working Babbage Engine, with a rather good lecture.
Antihighlights include the otherwise excellent display on the history of integrated circuits, sponsored by Intel, which doesn't mention ARM in any way anywhere...
The museum's totally worth a look if you're there.
http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2016/01/29/computer-museum-bids...
[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/lenna.shtml
Things like the relativistic boxcars in physics, the urns and balls in probability (http://www.arcaneknowledge.org/science/ehrenfest.html), the teapot, Lena, blocks-world in AI.
The VW was hand measured by Sutherland's students: Jim Clark (of SGI/Netscape fame), Bui-Tui Phong (of Phong shading fame), Raphel Rom (of Catmull-Rom spline fame), and Robert McDermott (of Vegreville Egg fame). (I just listed some highlights of careers, they all accomplished much more!)
A first hand account of the model creation is preserved by Mr. McDermott on page 7 of the Fall 2003 edition of The Utah Teapot [2] (the aptly named University of Utah School of Computing quarterly newsletter).
The CS Dept. at the U of Utah has such a storied history, especially rich in fundamental computer graphics research [3]. Growing up in proximity to it definitely shaped my career path.
[1] http://jalopnik.com/the-first-real-object-ever-3d-scanned-an...
[2] http://www.cs.utah.edu/docs/misc/Uteapot03.pdf
[3] http://www.cs.utah.edu/about/history