The Most Important Object In Computer Graphics History Is This Teapot - Facts So Romantic

Let’s play a game. I’ll show you a picture and a couple videos—just watch the first five seconds or so—and you figure out what they have in common. Ready? Here we go:

Microsoft Windows “Pipes” screensaver.Daniel Kufer/Youtube

Did you spot it? Each of them depicts the exact same object: a shiny, slightly squashed-looking teapot.

You may not have thought much of it if you saw it in that episode of The Simpsons, in Toy Story, in your old PC screensaver, or in any of the other films and games it’s crept into over the years. Yet this unassuming object—the “Utah teapot,” as it’s affectionately known—has had an enormous influence on the history of computing, dating back to 1974, when computer scientist Martin Newell was a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah.

The U of U was a powerhouse of computer graphics research then, and Newell had some novel ideas for algorithms that could realistically display 3D shapes—rendering complex effects like shadows, reflective textures, or rotations that reveal obscured surfaces. But, to his chagrin, he struggled to find a digitized object worthy of his methods. Objects that were typically used for simulating reflections, like a chess pawn, a donut, and an urn, were…
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from #ENT-AlexandrosSfakianakis via ola Kala on Inoreader http://ift.tt/2sMVzA0