There are few things that send me in to a Wayne Knight nerd squeal than the complete over-analysis of ridiculous things. Today’s example of this comes from Wired physics guru Rhett Allain who geeked out in a major way over Angry Birds [99¢ / Lite / HD], not obsessing over collecting every star, or topping leaderboards, but instead looking at the raw physics of the game. Or, as Rhett put it:
But what about the physics? Do the birds have a constant vertical acceleration? Do they have constant horizontal velocity? Let’s find out, shall we? Oh, why would I do this? Why can’t I just play the dumb game and move on. That is not how I roll. I will analyze this, and you can’t stop me.
Using video tracking software, Allain loaded up one of the many solution videos on YouTube to record the velocity of the bird and the acceleration of its vertical motion. Armed with these figures, and assuming that Angry Birds takes place on Earth, through the magic of math he was able to determine that the launcher in Angry Birds is about 5 meters tall. Once he figured this out, it was trivial to measure the birds themselves using the launcher as a ruler of sorts. If the launcher is 5m tall, the standard angry red bird is around 70cm (or 2 feet and 3.5 inches) tall.
That’s one huge bird.
[via Wired]
