While on my ski trip I managed to do quite a bit of work on a project for my physics class. It is quite over the top for fifteen participation points in a high-school physics class. I wanted to make a program that would be an effective tool to help teach a few aspects of projectile motion while making it cool  to watch.

 

I look at it like this. I was just lucky to come up with a way to get some credit for what I do anyway. :) It is pretty neat if I may say so myself.

 

    It is designed with two views: one orthographic and one regular. The regular camera allows you to zoom in and out and pan as the projectile(s) are being fired. The orthographic view functions as a 2d, live resizing, and to scale representation of what can be explored in the 3d view. Velocity vectors are drawn for the firing projectile and each of its periodic markers. You can also use the mouse to further inspect the launches.

 

 

    It gets really cool when you fire a few projectiles at once in slow-mo. You can then do some “Matrix”-ish bullet-time sort of camera movements. This is way too much fun to be physics.

 

 

I would love some feedback on it. Drop me an email if you like it. Or even if you don’t!

 

I may make it available as a dashboard widget or a web applet at a later date. For now it is only available for Mac OS X (PPC) as a standalone application.

 

~David