Skateology and the Physics of an Ollie

Adam Shomsky has a Youtube channel filled with high frame rate slow motion videos of skateboarding and “other random stuff that looks cool in slow mo, like fire.” A writer over at Wired used an open source physics video analysis tool called Tracker (Insert Tracker vs. Indy joke here.) to break down the forces at work in an ollie. The resulting animated gifs are vaguely interesting and sort of hypnotic, especially if you like looking at lots of vectors and symbols overlaid on skateboard videos. Check out The Physics of Doing an Ollie on a Skateboard, or, the Science of Why I Can’t Skate.