Physics Tracker Communal Data

Project #3304 on iSENSEProject.org

Using a web app called Physics Tracker, the position of a ball being thrown, or any other physical experiment, can be determined frame-by-frame using computer vision!

The app also calculates velocity and acceleration, and supports upload to iSENSE!  Anybody can contribute to this project using the application.  Visualize the raw data people had so far below, or check out these instructional visualizations of a ball being dropped straight down:

• Position vs Time: Note the bounces!
• Velocity vs Time: Note the velocity becoming positive at each bounce.
• Acceleration vs Time: Note the strange jumps during the bouncing due to the sudden change in acceleration.  Otherwise, the acceleration is fairly constant!  The more we operate on data, the more uncertain it gets, so acceleration is not as smooth as  position.  We could try using an iSENSE quadratic fit instead!
• Position in Different Coordinate Systems: An older demo.

Please contribute to the project at bit.ly/physics-track or check out the code and background on GitHub!

A note on units: the units in this project are arbitrary, but the app allows you to draw a line to measure an object, meaning you can customize your units and analyze them, even compare them to real values like g.  Since everybody uses different units, no one unit was specified here, so use these data sets purely for looking at the physics qualitatively.