AccelARate

Inspiration

While playing badminton, one team member began recognizing all the physics concepts embedded in her favorite sport and wanted to help teach others physics through the use of sports concepts.

What it does

AccelARate uses your phone's accelerometer, gyroscope, and GPS to detect the acceleration and direction of your "throw" and then demonstrates the arc of the projectile, whether it is a basketball, baseball, or ping pong ball. It is all run online, no downloads necessary!

How we built it

We used our knowledge of ar.js, a-frame, and web development, as well as a lot of help from Stack Overflow and GitHub to build accelARate.

Challenges we ran into

Markerless AR technology is still very difficult to implement without using downloaded applications or requiring new, expensive phones. We had to adapt the current technology to work without markers by using the phone's GPS, accelerometer, and gyroscope to keep the augmented reality stable. We also had to refresh our Physics I knowledge to implement all the formulas and make the results accurate.

What we learned

We learned how to implement ar.js and a-frame, use augmented reality without markers, use various smartphone sensors, and combine these all into a webpage without needing to download anything.

What's next for AccelARate

We would like to have various kinds of sporting projectiles for players to throw and edit the sphere object to make it look like these. We would also like to improve upon the augmented reality to make it more stable. Further, we hope to animate the appearance of the balls so that students can see the arc as it is created. In a more general sense, we would like to extend this technology to teach about various physics concepts and include clearer explanations of the mechanics.

Built With

• aframe
• ar.js
• css3
• html5
• javascript
• love
• physics