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Real wireframe teapot mounted inside a Commodore Pet display (2004) (vimeo.com)
56 points by rwmj on Dec 12, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 12 comments


"Escape from New York" from 1981 used a similar fluorescent paint + UV lights trick to simulate futuristic computer displays that appear in the movie.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_New_York#Filming


"Some sources cite [James] Cameron as the brains behind the glider navigation sequence..."

https://wearethemutants.com/2017/02/14/the-glider-navigation...

Clip from the film:

https://youtu.be/xxYmMRxnEic


This is like the demoscene equivalent of "solving" the Rubik's Cube by removing the stickers from the faces and reapplying them in the correct configuration of one solid color per face.


What a cool project. I hope the PET was already broken. Fun fact: the real thing does not have a graphic mode, only text, so you would not be able to render wireframes like this on it even if it had the CPU power to do so.


Is this just an art project? Would have liked to see the mechanism inside.


There's a bit more on the project page which is no longer online but luckily was captured by the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20040929101705/http://www.cybern...

Unfortunately it doesn't go into how he made the text or much detail on the glowing paint / lights used.

Edit: I realised there's a current link (in the Vimeo description!). It's https://www.niklasroy.com/project/32/grafikdemo


I'm curious about the text as well. The photo gallery shows it placed quite some distance in front of the teapot, which I guess is what you would expect.

We recently bought an Utah teapot - a company that I think is the original manufacturer (Friesland Porzellan) still produces them, nowadays promoting mainly to people like us who are familiar with it as a wireframe. Apparently the design is from the 1950s, which seems congruent with the way it looks. The thing that is most striking about it, in use, is that it's an incredibly good pourer compared to most of the other teapots we've owned. I am almost transfixed by the smoothness of the tea leaving the spout.


I too recently got the Friesland Melitta teapot, and decided to put it on the shelf in my office despite it being very nice at making tea; I then supplemented my tea station with a slightly different vintage Friesland coffee set that included cups and saucers.

Who would have thought that the utah teapot was my gateway drug into buying vintage porcelain?!

I mean, seriously: look at how cool this shit is: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vtg-MELITTA-20-100-Germany-Coffee-P...


My friend has a serious Poole Pottery addiction, to the point where my spare room was, until relatively recently, storing it for her. I needed the room back and had to put my foot down.


I hadn't heard of that type before, but a quick search suggests: not my kink.

I'm such a big fan of the boxy, overtly geometric/simple German style that I moved to Germany and regularly visit the Bauhaus. That Poole stuff... would not be allowed in my house. :D


Someone once showed me a library that could do simple wire frames on the Atari 800. Not that many lines, but similar frame rate.


Frame time for this demo is probably near Planck time. I doubt the Atari 800 was getting anywhere near that.




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