I would like to draw your attention to a free software program (for IBM
compatibles) called PhysVis that might be of interest to the members of this
list. PhysVis is designed to measure kinematic quantities from digital video
recorded in the Windows(TM) AVI format. PhysVis was developed by and is used by
the Physics Department at Kenyon College for labs at all levels of the
curriculum. It's use is described in the January issue of The Physics Teacher
(Blume-Kohout, et al., TPT, 35, 22 (1997)). PhysVis was developed as part of an
NSF-ILI grant.
Video, with its 1/30 s frame rate, is a terrific illustration of Newton's use
of calculus to quantify motion. The cost of digital video is rapidly falling
and it is thus becoming financially possible to record motion in the physics
lab with digital video. PhysVis enables one to replay motion video a frame at a
time and extract position (or angle) data as a function of time for further
analysis. The resulting data is in a simple, columnar ASCII format suitable for
importation into many calculational programs. (We also offer a free companion
program used in our labs called PhysFit that provides calculational, curve
fitting, and graphing tools to analyze kinematic data.)
The program was written using the Microsoft Video for Windows standard (AVI)
and the Microsoft standard multimedia control interface (MCI) so that it should
work with virtually any PC compatible running Windows 3.1 or higher. If you can
play a video with the Windows utility program "MediaPlayer", you should be able
to use PhysVis. Under Windows 3.1, the program requires the Microsoft Video for
Windows runtime package. This is available for free download from our site (or
from www.microsoft.com), but is likely already loaded on your machine if you
view AVI videos or are running Windows 95/NT.
A self-extracting ZIP file of the program is available for download by FTP from
our website.
It is also available by anonymous ftp at ftp.kenyon.edu under the directory
/pub/ftp/physics/software/windows/physvis .
We would appreciate hearing about any problems (and successes!) that people
have in getting PhysVis to run on your system. I am also happy to answer any
question anyone may have about the program or its capabilities. Please email to
physvis@kenyon.edu.