I know this topic has been done to death, but in trying to come up with a way to classify toroids, I came to realize we've barely scratched the surface of them. Here I use the approach of imagining the axes around which we can move the plane of a toroid as being similar to the major axes inside an octahedron and choosing specific axes that are parallel with the arm, hand path, or neither.

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A follow-up to last week's poi math video. This one tells us how to determine the size of the hand path for poi when we're graphing out patterns using parametric equations. Includes properties of wavelength and amplitude among other nifty math concepts.

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Here's an interesting idea inspired by Mel's recent video of his workshop on snakes: I'd noticed that when he was practicing tracing along his arm that it was somewhat reminiscent of a box mode antispin flower that had been somewhat squashed. This reminded me of a concept that had been thrown out on the old Tribe tech poi group: the snake eye. This was a trick wherein you'd take a snake but perform it in antispin, theoretically creating cateyes around your shoulder. While Mel's arm tracer definitely doesn't produce a cateye, it does seem very compatible with snakes. Here's the result.

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People frequently reference the math behind poi on many forums and groups, but it can seem a little daunting to folks that don't have that kind of background. Here's an attempt to level the playing field. A lot of this will be review for the more mathematically inclined folks out there, but for those who aren't, hopefully this will give you the Cliff's Notes as to some of the math we use to describe flowers and the like and make it a little bit more digestible. If you like this, please leave me feedback as I've got plans in my mind to do a whole series of these kinds of videos :)

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There's been some chat in the past week about zero points and how they differentiate from plane bends and even whether they do so at all. Here's my take on the concept (which, rarely enough for poi seems to be very internally logical ;) and how one can think of plane changing as being something of a sliding scale where on one end the poi stops moving (zero point) and on the other the hand stops moving (orbing).

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Last video we rolled through three different approaches to defining CAPs. Here is an alternate approach to breaking down such motions: a couple years ago, Alien Jon introduced me to the idea of spinning composites. Compositing is chaining together increments of poi movement that overlap in hand and poi position to either create repeatable patterns or transition and shift seamlessly between patterns.

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The question of what constituted a CAP recently came up both in the Tech Poi and Vulcan Tech Gospel groups on Facebook. Here are what I'd consider to be the three main approaches to describing a CAP--in my next video, I'm going to detail a slightly different approach to this question and some of the cool patterns that come not from trying to classify all the CAPs, but from taking the lessons that learning CAPs provide and applying them to more complex types of motion.

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More throws for your consumption--this time a type of toss I've heard both Erik and Ted refer to as a "sneaky toss". It's something like a float throw but performed in such a way that it seems to continue a static or small extension motion, rather than requiring a loop like isolated or overhead tosses. It's an integral component in a type of toss weave I've seen Poiboi do in his videos and a fun sneaky toss switch that G showed me while he was in town. I think his version finished differently, but I like the properties the version I'm doing here has.

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Whoa...white balance what? Anys, I've done a lot of videos lately on the concept of the toroid flower, and I wanted to revisit it from a place of flow--that is how toroid flowers can be combined with other types of spinning, specifically the 2D spinning we're more traditionally used to. Outlined here are two methods: plane-bending a toroid into the traditional plane orientation or imagining toroids that overlap on a single point and therefore create a junction to switch from one to another. Happy flowing! :)

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There was a blink-and-you-might miss it moment in my video on timing and direction in toroid flowers that struck me as I was playing with them earlier today: namely, that toroids are direction agnostic. You can change the direction of the hand as you're performing one and keep the toroid in whatever mode you started in, be it antispin or isolation. This means that it inherits many of the mix-and-match capabilities from staff and clubs that we find with tools that aren't gravity dependent and opens up the field of what we can do with them a lot wider.

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