The Video Physics Lab Project

We came up with this idea in 1997 but we still have not seen it commercially available!

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Who we are:

• The project was directed by Dr. Kyle Forinash (at IUS in the Physics department) with most of the work and technical support provided by Charley Clark (while a Computer Science at IUS)

What the project was about:

The idea was to give students access to video capture experiments over the web.

• It is possible to capture video from a camera and load the clips onto a computer with many varieties of software and hardware.
• Physics software also exists (for example VideoGraph) which will allow you make graphs of the velocity and acceleration of objects in the video (this is done by marking the object using a cursor in each frame- the software then calculates and graphs the motion).
• We were trying to extend this to include video captured from a remote video camera or from the web.
• This would be useful if you did not have have sufficient equipment to provide a video capture experience in a lab setting with multiple students.

Equipment and software we used to do this (in 1997):

• Sony Video Camera.
• Power Mac 8500/120 with a built in video card running OS 8.5.1 .
• WebCam software (shareware: www.rearden.com).
• NetPresenz web server (support@stairways.com.au)
• Applescripts written by Charley Clark.

How it worked:

• When you hit a section on the web page it activated an Applescript which instructed the WebCam software to make a video capture of some real time motion (the camera could be pointed out the window at traffic or at other motion in our laboratory).
• The NetPresenz server software downloaded still selections from the captured video (arbitrarily set at five pictures) to your browser (sample picture of toy climbing penguins).
• The stills were loaded into a Java applet which allows you to:
• Scale sizes in the picture (a known sized object was included in each frame) and
• Determine the location of objects in the pictures according to the scale you set (screen shot of web browser).
• Once you have recorded the location and time of the object in each frame you could calculate the velocity and acceleration of the object (using your own graphing and calculating tools- these were not supplied by the server in this version).
• We will leave this set up for a while longer but we can't be certain how much longer it will be available or if it will work: Virtual Physics Video Lab. (Last updated: 09/29/1997)

Status and problems:

• Obviously this is now very old and obsolete equipment which we no longer have. Same with the software.
• When it was working it was very slow (typically two minutes before you saw your pictures).
• You could not see what you were downloading (you got the still pictures without ever seeing the live video).
• The Java Applet could only give the numerical locations (it did not make graphs of the data).
• Presentations:
  • R. Wisman, C. Clark, K. Forinash; 'Real Time Data Acquisition via the Internet', contributed talk at the Annual meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers, 1/6/98, New Orleans.
• NOTE: This capability is still not available on the commercial market. If you are interested in working on this project, contact Dr. Forinash.