Physics

There are many bundles related to physics, including

• A Physics (activity) which provides a physics engine and scene editor
• A Physics-based game called x2o
• A Physics (collection) (with articles about physics in a few languages)

There was a physics meeting on July 10.

Physics simulations

See physics engines for a list of a few engines, and their current state of compatibility with stock Sugar builds on an XO, including Box2D, which is used in Physics (activity).

mokurai is looking into other things that exist for upcoming discussions.

Brian, Daniel and Naz looked at various ports/wrappers of Box2D:

• http://box2dflash.sourceforge.net/ Actionscript 3 Box2D - This does not load with Gnash because Gnash tries to copy AVM1 (virtual machine of Flash 8 and below). It runs fine on Adobe Flash 9 & 10 which both use the AVM2 in both the Opera browser and the Browse Activity (albeit slowly because the Physics calculations here are Math & CPU heavy)
• http://jbox2d.org/ Java box2d... made by user:ewjordan No chance of working on the XO any time soon.
• http://box2d-js.sourceforge.net/index2.html Javascript Box2D - actually has the 5-ball pendulum you describe, in addition to a cool motorjoint-based ball-paddling/juggling device - I tested JS on the XO with the latest joyride -- it ran reasonably with two objects, unreasonably slow with three.

A physics scene editor

See Physics (activity) for details of the Sugar physics scene editor being built using the open source Box2D physics library.

Current needs include:

• a format for scenes that can be shared across engines.
• a way to save/export(/import?) a scene from within the activity

Physics_(activity) and x2o would rely on this.

Physics and vision processing

Vision processing shows much promise for allowing freeform kinesthetic interaction with the XO.

Combining this with user-defined physics simulation would allow for more creative visual feedback from this kinesthetic interaction.

(nrp via games list) For example, letting someone 
take a picture of themselves, let them select their face
in the picture, and then crop that and use it as a character
in a game.

Physics (other bundles)

There are physics collections in a few languages. There are also a number of unsugarized physics engines or simulators that have been tested on the XO, which could be made available

Physics curriculum materials

There is a very interesting on-line high school physics course here: http://online.cctt.org/

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