DIGM 540 - Engineering Statics Game Concept 00 - Ring with Strings

May 24th, 2018

Engineering Statics Game Concept - 00

Vimeo - Concept for Engineering Statics Game

This was a quick proof of concept to show the idea from the last post at work. This concept takes inspiration from the hands on engineering kit that used masses on strings tugging on a central ring object to teach topics such as center of mass and vector math.

The forces from the nodes on the ring are calculated to emulate that of a mass attached to a string. Each node has a mass value associated with it (which would be the mass hanging off of it in the real world kit), and this influences how much force that node is applying to the main circular object. Moving the nodes or changing their mass value will influence the position of the ring, as it effectively represents the center of mass of the entire system through the forces applied by the nodes.

Using a simple example, I was quickly able to run a test to double check if the values provided by this toy were matching that of the true calculations and they did for the single test I've run so far. The center of mass equations of a system of particles was used, which can be found here on Wikipedia: Center of Mass - Wiki