Reality Verification of Kobe Bryant
25/05/08 21:35 Filed in: Physics
Ok, I am trying to be quick with this, since it is
current. Here is an awesome video of Kobe Bryant
jumping over a pool with snakes in it (I found this
on digg):
It looks so crazy, I wanted to do a quick analysis to see if this is feasible (well, I know it is not feasible for me). Let me just pull out one of my favorite tools - Tracker Video Analysis.
It looks so crazy, I wanted to do a quick analysis to see if this is feasible (well, I know it is not feasible for me). Let me just pull out one of my favorite tools - Tracker Video Analysis.
Step 1. Get the movie. I used Mpeg Streamclip to get the
movie in quicktime format from flash video.
Step 2. Get some stuff to calibrate the video. I first tried searching for that particular pool in the video so I could find out how big it was. Epic Fail. Next I went to wikipedia to get the dimensions of Kobe Bryant entity. He is 1.98 meters.
Step 3. Analyze the video. Here is the vertical motion of Kobe.
From this, we (me and you) can see a couple of important things. First, it is a parabolic graph. This indicates the acceleration is constant. Second, I can obtain a value for this acceleration. It will be twice the coefficient of the x2 term. This means that the acceleration of Kobe while jumping is 9.56 m/s2. This is close enough to the expected value of 9.8 m/s2 that the video seems real. But I will continue (because it is difficult for me to stop).
Let me now look at the horizontal motion:
This is clearly a straight line indicating that there is no horizontal acceleration. This is also an indication of non-fakedness.
What can be learned from this analysis?
How far did he jump? Well, he cleared the pool, that is 12 feet in diameter (I got that from assuming the scale of the video from Kobe).
How fast was he going when he jumped? Well, his horizontal velocity is 5.5 m/s. The initial vertical velocity can be found from the equation of motion:
So the total velocity (magnitude) will be:
This is 17 mph - that is pretty fast.
So, I guess Kobe is real. But this does not mean he isn't a robot or cylon or something. I agree the video looks odd, but I think that is because he jumps so darn far.
Step 2. Get some stuff to calibrate the video. I first tried searching for that particular pool in the video so I could find out how big it was. Epic Fail. Next I went to wikipedia to get the dimensions of Kobe Bryant entity. He is 1.98 meters.
Step 3. Analyze the video. Here is the vertical motion of Kobe.
From this, we (me and you) can see a couple of important things. First, it is a parabolic graph. This indicates the acceleration is constant. Second, I can obtain a value for this acceleration. It will be twice the coefficient of the x2 term. This means that the acceleration of Kobe while jumping is 9.56 m/s2. This is close enough to the expected value of 9.8 m/s2 that the video seems real. But I will continue (because it is difficult for me to stop).
Let me now look at the horizontal motion:
This is clearly a straight line indicating that there is no horizontal acceleration. This is also an indication of non-fakedness.
What can be learned from this analysis?
How far did he jump? Well, he cleared the pool, that is 12 feet in diameter (I got that from assuming the scale of the video from Kobe).
How fast was he going when he jumped? Well, his horizontal velocity is 5.5 m/s. The initial vertical velocity can be found from the equation of motion:
So the total velocity (magnitude) will be:
This is 17 mph - that is pretty fast.
So, I guess Kobe is real. But this does not mean he isn't a robot or cylon or something. I agree the video looks odd, but I think that is because he jumps so darn far.
