Spherical or plane-bent CAPs?

The past few weeks in my video blog, I've played with the concept of taking our current understanding of elliptical CAPs and translating them into 3-D shapes. I dubbed the concept "spherical CAPs" but I'm now starting to question if it's either accurate or actually descriptive of the concept. Here's why:

I've blogged before about the mathematics of CAPs (or at the very least referenced what someone else wrote on the topic ;) and have finally come to understand that the concept is rooted not necessarily in the idea of having a repeatable "move" per-se, but in the idea of having multiple segments that incorporate different moves to form new patterns--hence "assembly patterns." This now explains to me why elliptical CAPs are referred to as such: they are collections of ellipses that are assembled into larger patterns.

So are the "spherical" patterns that have been showing up in my videos made up of spheres? Nope, they're named via the opposite approach: the fact that the path of the hands trace out the wireframe of a sphere. If, for example, one where to approach using two of the 3D CAP patterns I've played with and transition between two 3D shapes, one could then make the argument that you'd created an assembly pattern made up of multiple spherical shapes, but also by that logic, moving between repeatable patterns with unit circle hybrids would likewise qualify. Perhaps we could approach the concept of a "unit sphere" the same way--not as a basic unit of movement but as a basic element of 3D CAP patterns.

Food for thought...

Tech Video Blog #38: Atomic CAP (I kid you not), unit sphere theory, stall intensive continues

Starting off with an utterly bizarre pattern--the same-time opposites CAP performed with the extension in wall plane and the antispin petal in corkscrew plane. The idea for this came from a post Dyami made about the idea of a unit sphere on the Tech Poi forum of Tribe.net. I think the concept is a dead-end, but trying to prove it has led to some really interesting patterns, including a 3D triquetra I play with in here. Also, the transition from butterfly top-stall to hybrid that I couldn't include last week is in here and finally I'm working turns into my stall intensive.

A 3D Unit Sphere?

Dyami started up this thread on Tribe about two weeks ago: http://techpoi.tribe.net/thread/37590299-0963-4197-befb-3d7fbcf007ce

In it, he's taking Alien Jon's concept of the unit circle and pondering whether it can be applied to 3D geometry to create a similar family of moves that work within the path of a sphere.

I've been back and forth on this now for the past couple weeks because I can't for the life of me think of any new concepts this would add to the vocabulary of poi, but also not wanting to dismiss the concept completely because there is always the possibility I've become so focused on a given paradigm I can't see my way out of it. The issue with this concept I keep stopping at is that by definition I think poi spinning is two-dimensional.

What do I mean by this? Well, the head of a poi can only be in one direction from the hand anchoring it at any given time and the influence of gravity will always make it settle in one direction. The same issue exists with all spinning tools I'm aware of, from staff to meteor. The movement of a hand guiding a poi always represents a single two-dimensional slice of a three dimensional shape since it can only explore one extension of the shape at any given time. To describe this another way, imagine if your hand could support spinning three poi at once--one in each of the three planes. In this case, you could move your hand in three dimensions in ways that would drastically change the behavior of all three poi.

Put another way, think of poi spinning as being like watching a movie. While what we see on screen is a two-dimensional rendering of a three-dimensional scene, it doesn't seem in the least bit odd to us. The reason for this is that we really see in only two dimensions, but sort out a third by overlapping two two-dimensional images on top of each other and working out the differences between the two. Likewise, when viewing a poi spinner, no viewer can sort more than two dimensions of poi movement at a given time. Poi being spun parallel to the angle of the viewer is seen for all intents and purposes as a straight line. By the same token, any trick done in three dimensions that I can conceptualize will wind up resembling a two dimensional trick that has likely already been named when seen by an audience.

Thus any three-dimensional family of figures one can map out in a "unit sphere" actually wind up just being two-dimensional figures rendered differently for the audience. Or at least that's the conclusion I keep coming to. Anybody else have any success finding 3D moves that don't have 2D corollaries?