#Flappy golf 2 gravity lab hole 6 update

UPDATE : While the gravitational acceleration in Flappy Bird is realistic, the impulse provided by the taps are NOT realistic. Once I got the timing right, I uploaded the video to YouTube, trimmed it, made a slow motion version in YouTube editor, then stitched the real-time and slow motion videos together to create the final video you see above. Next, I played the basketball drop video and Flappy Bird on side-by-side iPads and recorded that with my phone’s camera.

Dan just needed to be the right distance away from the camera so that the size of the basketball on the iPad screen was the same size as Flappy Bird on the screen (1.5 cm). So I had my physics teacher colleague Dan Longhurst drop a basketball so I could video it with my iPad. Conveniently, basketballs are also about 24 cm across. Here’s what I did: We determined from the analysis above that Flappy Bird is about 24 cm across. We made a video showing Flappy Bird falling at the same rate as a basketball: As one of my students you know what would make an awesome demo, dropping a ball and watching it fall with same accel as flappy bird. People have gotten used to it, and when a game like Flappy Bird comes along with realistic physics, people exclaim that it must be wrong. In order to make Angry Birds more fun to play, the programmers had to make the physics less realistic. Repeating the same video analysis on Angry Birds and assuming the red bird is the size of a robin (24 cm), we get a gravitational acceleration of 2.5 m/s/s, which only 25% of Earth’s gravitational pull. So then why is everyone complaining that the game is unrealistic when, in fact, it is very realistic? I blame Angry Birds and lots of other video games. If we assume he’s as long as a robin (24 cm), then the slope of the velocity-time graph is 9.75 m/s/s, which is really close to Earth’s gravitational acceleration of 9.8 m/s/s. The only thing we could realistically assume is the size of Flappy Bird.

#Flappy golf 2 gravity lab hole 6 pro

Sure enough, the upside-down parabolic curves indicate Flappy is undergoing downward acceleration.īut do the numerical values represent normal Earth-like gravity or insanely hard Jupiter gravity? In order to do this, we need to (1) set a scale in the video so that Logger Pro knows how big each pixel is in real life and (2) determine the slope of Flappy’s velocity-time graph while in free fall, which is equal to the gravitational acceleration. Then I imported the videos into Logger Pro and did a typical video analysis by tracking Flappy’s vertical position in the video.

(I’ve uploaded several of the videos here if you’d like to use them yourself or with students: Flappy Bird Videos.) To keep the phone steady, I placed it on top of a ring stand with the iPad underneath. Sounds like a job for Logger Pro video analysis! I used my phone to take a video of Flappy Bird on my iPad. So, is the physics unrealistic in Flappy Bird? It's not intuitive like most game mechanics. The physics of Flappy Bird is so bad which is why it's so difficult to play.