Inside a Computer Graphics Lab, Episode Boomerang

Once upon a time, in a computer graphics lab, there were one bunny and one boomerang, carefully placed at the central location of the office.

Visitors walking in the corridor, even those mathematicians who always immerse their minds in theorems and equations, would unconsciously make their pace slow as they near the door of our office, and irresistibly turn their eyes to where the superstars are situated.

It is hard to read their faces at that specific moment. You know why it is hard. Perplexity, shock, amazement, awe, joy and perhaps a bit of sorrow in the end. That is probably the confluence of every feeling I know.

“Their beauty is the siren’s song.”, the colleague sitting opposite me made a comment.

“Hey! That was supposed to be my line!”, I raised my eyebrow and thought.

“Yeah, can’t agree more. That’s very to the point”, I nodded and said, “Do you know the other day, the bunny was invited to a photo booth where there was a whole of insanely luxurious setup. And there was this obsessive camera man who stayed there with it for a whole weekend, restless, just to find the best way to capture its beauty with his expensive camera.”.

“Wow, that’s crazy! But do you know how that ended up?”, the colleague was intrigued.

“Well, there were some shots I’ve seen, and they were like, you know, okay.”, I shrugged, “But how can you expect him to get even closed to what you see with your eyes when the bunny itself is really in front of you?”

“Oh yeah, of course. And by the way, have you heard about that thing about the boomerang.”

“What?”

“Like there was some sort of conference in France, and one of the presenters was trying to discuss what’s behind the elegancy of the boomerang, and audience there went all excited, asking so many questions non-stop that the presenter got overwhelmed and the host had to stop them.”

Fine. I feel like I’d better wake up and stop the dramatic nonsense fictional story.

But I have to say, it’s not totally made up. It’s based on real story (well, partially), for example, the parts where the presenter gets overwhelmed by questions and where the cameraman getting stuck in the lab over the weekend for taking photos (before the deadlines).

Things like "luxurious" or "expensive" are definitely not true, though.

And this is how the boomerang and the bunny are actually treated. (heart breaking alert).

The boomerang was used to shoot the fast forward video, in which it plays as the protagonist. That was pretty cool, but he also made a sacrifice, for scientific purposes.

Bunny had a hard time as well 😢 See these two pictures and you’d know what happened.

It might be a bummer this is not one of those “live ever after, happily” story. But, still, we have 100% of interviewee think the boomerang and bunny are cool after running a questionnaire!

Sample size of the questionnaire: 2. :smirk:

No matter what, I still clearly remember that day when I walked into the office and this is the first thing I saw: