Help come up with a gaming-related physics investigation?

Lucifer666

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All rightie, long story short, one of the areas that's assessed in my physics investigation is "personal engagement" or in other words "how interested is the student in this topic"

so I figured I'll make the topic something I AM interested in, thus, video games/electronics

I have some outlines for ideas, but I need help converting them into a proper experiment, i.e. something measurable, containing numbers that I would ideally be able to draw into a line graph (for example, if I said "coffee filters", an appropriate investigation would be "how does the temperature of the liquid flowing through a coffee filter affects its rate of flow?" This is good as I can conduct the experiment and gather results)

  • The first one I thought of is something to do with the circuitry behind an LCD screen. is there anything I could do with that? Something along the lines of "how does the current supplied to an LCD pixel affect the wavelength of the colour it emits?" (this is just an example, I actually have no idea if current has anything to do with colour, also there's no ****ing way I can test that)
  • The second one I thought of is the 3DS's 3D screen. The parallax barrier redirects a different image to each eye, providing a sense of depth or protrusion as far as I understand. I know this links quite well to light waves as a physics topic, hence why I thought of it. Is there any idea or experiment I could work with based on this?
Remember that I need to actually conduct the experiment so try not to make your suggestions too impossible :) I have a DS lite and a 3DS system I'm willing to use in my experiment, and I'm also given access to a pretty well-equipped laboratory
Any ideas? Cheers
 

FAST6191

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How did I miss this thread first time around? What sort of level are we aiming for, what sort of experimental time/effort and what background are you coming at this from? I do not want to give you something suitable for a postgrad final project if you are doing the sort of thing they give to 18 year olds as a "prove you can set up and write a report" thing for half a day as an assessment. I am always slightly hesitant to go for my interests in these sorts of projects -- if you intend to show off your experimental prowess then pick something that does that, I often find personal interest projects have a nasty habit of hamstringing you in some way.

The circuitry behind LCD screens is a bit of a nightmare




You might be able to do something like 1 if you had a OLED pixel screen and were willing to potentially cook it.

The lenticular screen on the 3ds... the main thing worth looking at (and it is not a good one) might be something like treating the screen as a prism (it is one) and seeing where the light splits apart. It is likely to be way beyond the 3d sweet spot and probably hard to do experimentally (you will almost certainly need a rather large space that is very dark, you might even want to force the issue with some kind of compound lens arrangement (this prism splits a beam to 10mm per colour at 3m, using a 3ds in full 3d this changes to 2.5m, here are some nice lens equations to work out the effective length at which this would happen if the 3ds screen was bright enough). With that sort of setup you can probably even get a nice experimental errors paragraph/discussion (compound the lens and you compound the errors) and examiners love that stuff.
 
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Lucifer666

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Holy moly, that was cool to watch.

Anyway with regards to your question about the level I'm working at, I see you're in the UK so I'm glad I won't have to explain what sixth form/British college is :P It's my coursework. I'm not doing A-levels though, I take IB Higher Level physics (the content of which I've heard coincides with a lot of material from the first few years of physics at uni)

So yeah, definitely the sort of thing they give to 18 year olds but I reckon it's a bit more sophisticated than "prove you can set up and write a report"

Despite what you think, what you've said about treating the screen like a prism is actually not bad. Seems a bit more complicated than I was hoping for though, and this isn't an issue at all with my personal understanding of it, but rather I feel like it's too much effort for the course requirements. Nonetheless I'll consider!

PS. the 2 bullet points in the OP weren't restrictions on what I'm looking for, they were just the results of my brainstorming session. I'm open to ideas of all sorts to do with gaming/electronics :)

Thanks for your help!
 

FAST6191

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Battery drain tests perhaps. You can measure current and voltage with respect to time, possibly battery temperature, will have to design a jig of some form (maybe a time lapse with a camera* if you do not have a multimeter/scope with logging), have a bunch of stuff you can control for (3d effect, 3d graphics in the game vs just using 2d hardware, DS mode for the 3ds, sound up, sound down, brightness, in standby....), you can start out by dissing manufacturer claims (or speculating upon how they might different from the real world), maybe find a deal extreme/ebay special and tests its claims of the crazy mAh values, if you have a flash cart vs the real deal vs eshop.....

Not quite as fancy as the prism stuff from earlier and will take a while to do if you are doing full discharge curves (back when I had to do similar things we were all bundled in a classroom and given either 3 hours or a whole day to get the results, this might take longer).
 

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