Analysis of the Human Bird Wings
wired.com
Analysis of the Human Bird Wings
1–10 of 30 posts
Re: Analysis of the Human Bird Wings
#2His take off speed and the angle of attack for his wings looks suspect. As much as I want this to be real it looks like he is in a stall the moment his feet lift off the ground. I am looking at this from a traditional fixed wing aircraft view though so my views could be flawed.
Re: Analysis of the Human Bird Wings
#3Absolutely fake. If this is not obvious to you, learn more physics.
Re: Analysis of the Human Bird Wings
#4Absolutely fake. If this is not obvious to you, learn more physics.
you can tell by the pixels right? if its so obvious you would be able to explain your problems with the video in a succinct manner
Re: Analysis of the Human Bird Wings
#5Absolutely fake. If this is not obvious to you, learn more physics.
It looks as if the author -did- look at the event with a fairly in-depth analysis, and the results were plausible yet inconclusive.
Re: Analysis of the Human Bird Wings
#6Re: Analysis of the Human Bird Wings
#7I had to follow back to the submitted article's author's earlier blog posts, a couple of degrees of linking back, to figure out where the "log-plot of the wingspan vs. mass for different birds along with the human with wings" came from. It came from the author himself, without a validation study, and "anyone can edit" Wikipedia. People who know their history of physics well will remember that Galileo showed that in general, as an animal's size scales up, its mass increases with the cube (third power) of the scale factor while its surface area increases only with the square (second power) of the scale factor.
http://dinosaurtheory.com/scaling.html
http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/609.ral5q.fall04/Le...
To scale up flight by arm motion to the mass of a human adult would have to result in a very different wing loading from that of any bird. There is a lot of hand-waving about electric motor power (at what weight?) for the wings in the video being discussed here on HN, but no verifiable figures about what energy is input into the wings versus what weight the total assemblage has.
As astute comments pointed out in the earlier main thread about the video, it would be easy enough to verify this extraordinary claim just by letting some professional journalists take a look at the rig and weigh it and photograph it up close and do their own videography of a set of flights of the rig and its operator. There is no reason to take an amateur, self-produced video with unverified claims seriously about an issue that is so contrary to well studied principles of aeronautics. Until there is better quality evidence, there is no warrant for believing this extraordinary claim.
Re: Analysis of the Human Bird Wings
#8Absolutely fake. If this is not obvious to you, learn more physics.
you can tell by the pixels right? if its so obvious you would be able to explain your problems with the video in a succinct manner
Flapping wings do not simply vibrate vertically. Wings are hinged so they can greatly reduce the amount of air they push back up on the up stroke and to generate significant amounts of lift it takes a really dramatic motion. You can see how bad the motion is by compare flapping motion 35 seconds in vs an actual bird.
Also, trying to generate the type of energy required for flight with your arms is significantly harder than your legs.
Re: Analysis of the Human Bird Wings
#9Ignoring impossible feats of physics, the video is fake. There is a comment on the first Wired article which points out incontrovertible evidence of poorly done compositing around the 20 second mark with the guy on the left running "through" the wingtip without bumping it.
Uncut, raw video from the side of complete take-off and landing (since there is supposedly someone taking video from the side) would be enough to prove its real. Too bad this isn't real.
Re: Analysis of the Human Bird Wings
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks as if the author -did- look at the event with a fairly in-depth analysis, and the results were plausible yet inconclusive.
His results seem to suggest that the video wasn't CGI'ed, correct?
Well, no. They suggest that the camera shake wasn't added in after the fact with postprocessing of an existing image -- or at least that the image was fairly high-res and blur was also added after the fact. He doesn't rule out that the whole video wasn't computer-generated, nor that the dude was running into a greenscreen, nor for that matter a green cable that was digitally altered out, or anything like that. Some of these would venture into "faked" as opposed to CGI -- a cable which did not need to be shopped out might be an example, although whether you could have a nice construction crane nearby to operate it would be a worthwhile question, since the video doesn't give it much place to hide and the larger it is the more dangerous it would be to hang someone off of it and then move it from point A to point B.