Feature request: ability to go up to 100 m/s initial velocity

ariel-phet commented 7 years ago

@kathy-phet mentioned that Mike Dubson also would appreciate the ability to go to a larger velocity. Perhaps on the lab screen we could have an option for larger velocity ranges (up to 100 m/s). My guess is we would need to change scales a bit if we went to larger velocity (zoom out, potentially change the vector scaling, etc).

@arouinfar worth thinking about some possiblities, we can discuss at a design meeting once @kathy-phet is back in town.

arouinfar commented 7 years ago

Definitely worth considering @ariel-phet. My only concern is that the model can break down a bit when dealing with large drag forces, so we may also need to consider some constraints to the projectiles.

kathy-phet commented 7 years ago

I think JO's option for addressing better slow mo also makes the model more accurate and it could handle this? So if it goes hand in hand with that upgrade it made not be a limitation. K

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Definitely worth considering @ariel-phethttps://github.com/ariel-phet. My only concern is that the model can break down a bit when dealing with large drag forces, so we may also need to consider some constraints to the projectiles.

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arouinfar commented 7 years ago

We've received another request for faster initial velocities:

I am a physics teacher at a public charter school in Dallas, TX. I really like the recently updated projectile motion simulation! The ground target placement works much better than in the original. The graphics look great, and I am pleased to find that we can adjust for air resistance. The only thing that I really would have liked to see carried over from the original was the ability to have faster initial velocities. It made the math so much more exciting with the students to use extreme values and still hit the target.

arouinfar commented 6 years ago

Since this will be investigated with #124, marking this as deferred for now.

arouinfar commented 4 years ago

Since this sim is getting worked on again, it might be nice to consider allowing larger initial velocity values on the Lab screen. This should be pretty easy to experiment with locally, so self-assigning.

arouinfar commented 4 years ago

Allowing higher initial speeds means that the density of the path dots can get pretty high, and we will also need to expand the zoom range. Experimenting locally, I think 100 m/s is just too fast -- too many dots, long time-of-flights, and requires too extreme of a zoom level.

A compromise might be to increase the maximum velocity on the Lab screen to 50 m/s. We would only need to add one additional zoom out level, and the dot density is generally manageable.

Latest at max speed (30 m/s), min zoom. Trajectories at 80 and 45 at min g and Earth g. Projectile Motion screenshot (2)

Local version with max speed increased to 50 m/s, min zoom. Trajectories at 80 and 45 at min g and Earth g. Projectile Motion screenshot (4)

One thing I've noticed is that zooming out makes the trace tool a bit harder to use, even if probing on a sparser region of the trajectory. Adding one additional level of zooming out is not so bad, but adding three extra levels (as would be required for 100 m/s initial speed) makes it particularly hard to use the probe. The crosshairs need to be very exactly aligned to the dots to produce a reading.

oliver-phet commented 4 years ago

User email received on July 18, 2020:

Re Projectile Motion, how can we get a range of launch speeds on the HTML5 sim to match the range on the classic sim?

I like to use the sim to model boulders flung from a volcanic eruption (100 m/s would cover me for that). Lesson: Tavurvur Erupts key: https://www.dropbox.com/s/uxg0iifx4f0dsxa/YouTube_Tavurvur_Erupts-key.pdf?dl=0

I also like to use the sim to model the motion in the Dodge Nitro Jump ad (60 m/s would just barely cover me for that). Lesson: Dodge Nitro Jump Ad: https://www.dropbox.com/s/kd72bb5e6z1u7w6/YouTube_Dodge_Nitro_Jump-key.pdf?dl=0

It seems a launch speed of 100 m/s makes both of these possible. But de-restricting more broadly would allow for other activities as yet unforeseen. Maybe make launch speed a typed entry rather than a slider?

Both of these activities could be done with the classic / legacy/ Flash sim; neither can be done with the HTML5 sim because of its 30 m/s launch speed limitation.

arouinfar commented 4 years ago

Allowing higher initial speeds has become a fairly common user request. The main drawbacks to allowing an initial speed of 100 m/s are that it would require three additional levels of zooming out and the trajectory dots (drawn every 0.1 s) would become very dense making the tracer tool hard to use.

I think these would be non-issues if this sim had support for Zoom and Magnification. Let's discuss when we take this sim off the back burner.

zepumph commented 3 years ago

I played around with this, by changing in constants MIN_ZOOM value and the max initial speed to 100m/s. I found that it was sorta weird. I definitely think that the sim is not fully usable with that much zoom, but maybe that is ok? You can orient the cannon while zoomed in, and then zoom out to launch and see.

I also agree that there are too many point samples, it is unwieldy. Perhaps we could fix this with less samples displayed with zoomed out. I would have to look at the model though to see.

Also note that the zoom mag does help some, but you still have much too small a tolerance to get data point numbers:

And it is still a bit hard to control the cannon and target:

zepumph commented 3 years ago

We discussed this during today's design meeting with @arouinfar and @kathy-phet. We decided that we will implement this, and make the max 100m/s.

I believe that @arouinfar will provide a more detailed list of items to accomplish, but just to get things started here:

[ ] Increase the range to 100m/s, but only on the lab screen
[ ] Decrease the min zoom (zoom-out range) to allow the parabola of a trajectory with initial speed of 100 m/s. In meeting we liked 1/32, so I'll start there, and we can change as needed (only on the lab screen).
[x] Update DataProbe to be easier to "sense" data points when the zoom is so little (done in https://github.com/phetsims/projectile-motion/issues/275)
[x] Decrease the min of gravity to 1m/s/s (done in https://github.com/phetsims/projectile-motion/issues/263)
[ ] Create a control of some sort that can swap between a max of 30m/s and 100m/s, this way students don't immediately go to 100 and make their lives generally slower (takes forever to complete an animated trajectory), and harder (larger numbers to start with + needing zoom). @arouinfar will give mockups for this, and we will take it from there.

zepumph commented 3 years ago

I'm going to go ahead and wait for mockups before continuing here. I will take a look at https://github.com/phetsims/scenery-phet/issues/700, which seems promising. As for actually implementing the conditional range change only in the lab screen, a mockup will be best first. I hacked out one version with two different range constants, but I didn't really like it. Let's wait for a design before trying again.

arouinfar commented 1 year ago

Unassigning myself until work on this flavor of Projectile Motion resumes.

phetsims / projectile-motion

Feature request: ability to go up to 100 m/s initial velocity #153