CamMotion Project and Software Launched
The ViEW (Video for Exploring the World) project developed the CamMotion software, which allowed students to explore the mathematics of motion by creating and analyzing videos of their own movements, such as doing a cartwheel, jumping rope or riding a bike. The project was significantly ahead of its time, as video was analog – not digital – in the early 1990’s, so the first step in analyzing a video was to use a special “digitizer” to translate the video into machine-readable form. Then students used CamMotion to trace the position of a chosen point (e.g. their right hand) through consecutive frames, creating a trace of its motion over time, which was superimposed on a frame of the video. The software could then create graphs of x- or y-position over time, as well as calculate velocity. The system thus tied traditional physics and math representations to students’ embodied knowledge.