HPG “Bugs”

Attendees at HPG 2026 had the opportunity to take away a “bug” (with apologies to the ghost of SGI) or widget, or whatever you want to call it, inspired by the cover of Gödel, Escher, Bach — in that it shows the three letters of HPG depending on the direction from which you look at it. They were 3D-printed from PLA, and somehow probably not worse for the environment (or at least Andrew’s mental health) than the wooden Cornell Boxes.

In the interests of sharing and in the unlikely event that you would like to print your own, here are some .stl files suitable for importing to 3D printer software.

The lower-case hpgs printed for the conference had a squared-off short leg on the “h” — this is the side away from the “g”, so not immediately obvious from the “front”. This was absolutely a design feature in order to make it easer to stand the figure with the “h” upright (it’s quite unstable otherwise) and not an embarrassing mistake that makes the silhouette of the “g” not have a rounded descender... Both versions are provided above.

XYZ cube

Also available at the conference were a set of 3D-printed cubes with coordinate labels on each face. These are intended to help anyone who has been waving their fingers in the air trying to imagine the result of a transform on a coordinate space. The versions printed for the conference are engraved a bit more shallowly than was ideal for contrast, so the version provided below has deeper engraving (and more rounded corners). More importantly, unlike the version available at the conference, this file doesn’t have the “Z=0” face mirrored. In the conference version, this was absolutely an ironic demonstration of why a widget for tracking transforms is useful if you’re trying to model something in a hurry, not just an embarrasing mistake.

There is also a file containing only the numbers, which may help anyone wishing to do a two-color print.

Interested parties may also prefer version with just the axes.