Utah teapot
 A scan of the original diagram Martin Newell drew up, to plan the Utah Teapot before inputing it digitally.Image courtesy of Computer History Museum. |
The Utah teapot, or the Newell teapot, is a 3D computer model that has become a standard reference object (and something of an in-joke) in the computer graphics community. It is a mathematical model of an ordinary teapot of fairly simple shape, that appears solid, cylindrical and partially convex. A teapot primitive is considered the equivalent of a "hello, world" program, as a way to create an easy 3D scene with a somewhat complex model acting as a basic geometry reference for scene and light setup. Manyprogramming libraries even have functions dedicated to drawing teapots.
The teapot model was created in 1975 by early computer graphics researcher Martin Newell, a member of the pioneering graphics program at the University of Utah.
Newell needed a moderately simple mathematical model of a familiar object for his work. His wife Sandra Newell suggested modelling their tea service since they were sitting down for tea at the time. He got some graph paper and a pencil, and sketched the entire teapot by eye. Then he went back to the lab and edited bézier control points on a Tektronix storage tube, again by hand.
The teapot shape contains a number of elements that made it ideal for the graphics experiments of the time: it is round, contains saddle points, has a genus greater than zero because of the hole in the handle, can project a shadow on itself, and looks reasonable when displayed without a complex surface texture.
Newell made the mathematical data that described the teapot's geometry (a set of three-dimensional coordinates) publicly available, and soon other researchers began to use the same data for their computer graphics experiments. These researchers needed something with roughly the same characteristics that Newell had, and using the teapot data meant they did not have to laboriously enter geometric data for some other object. Although technical progress has meant that the act of rendering the teapot is no longer the challenge it was in 1975, the teapot continued to be used as a reference object for increasingly advanced graphics techniques.
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