(Disclaimer: I’m probably going to edit this as I read other people’s blogs and realize that I did the assignment wrong because I didn’t write it down fully. As far as I know, this is fine as long as it’s before it’s due!)
Alright, it’s time to make something! What am I going to make?
Also, who am I? Lets do that first. I’m Remy if you can’t tell! I know a little bit about a lot of things. Photoshop, Illustrator, Python, C, 3d scanning, building/maintaining computers, games, science, the list gets more and more vague as less and less prominent examples pop up in my mind (I’m also kinda modest about the work I do)
So, now for that first thing, what am I going to make?
Most prominently what comes to mind is my little “I’m gonna make a mo-cap suit that doesn’t need cameras!” fantasy, but that’s going to need some time. And a foundation. So, that foundation is what I’ll be working on!
What makes motion capture work? Knowing where what point is on an object at what time.
How do we know where things are without using our eyes? We don’t! How do we know where parts of our body are without using our eyes? Proprioception! How does that work? I have no (sure) idea.
So if I don’t know how my body can tell where it is, how do I expect my project to know where it is? Lucky for me, electronics are a lot simpler than the human body. So are physics. Newton’s first law says that an object that is still will stay still, and that an object that is moving will keep moving, until some other force acts upon it.
How can we tell if we’re moving? Acceleration. How do we measure acceleration? Our ears. How do electronics do it? Accelerometers.
But wait! Accelerometers only measure acceleration! What if the project stops moving or stops speeding up? The annoying answer would be to say “Newton’s first law explains that!” but I’m going to make it easy for you. When you’ve accelerated (sped up) to 80 miles an hour, and stop speeding up, you’re still going to be traveling at 80 miles an hour until something slows you down. So until something slows you down, Newton’s first law says you’re going at 80. If you do slow down, you experience deceleration, which is also known as negative acceleration. If you experience the same amount of acceleration speeding up and slowing down, you come to a complete stop.
So I’m going to make a device that knows where it is when given only a reference point, and will continue to know where it is until it runs out of resources using accelerometers (and maybe gyroscopes for rotation)
