Tracker is an open-source video analysis and modeling tool for Physics experiments. For example, using this tool you can accurately measure the trajectory motion of a ball being dropped from a certain height. Once you have created a model, this tool can then instantly provide you all the usual information such as velocity, acceleration and more. The tool can even plot the graph of the object’s position with time automatically.
Tracker is designed using Java based open-source Physics (OSP) framework. The tool requires the system to have JRE (Java Runtimes Environment) installed because it is designed using Oracle Java. But the installer package for Windows comes with a portable version of JRE included so that Windows users do not have to worry about JRE.
Tracker comes with a few examples which contains both the original video files and the data files which are generated when you analyze those videos. You can load these examples in Tracker to understand how everything works. It also comes with demo videos explaining you every single step of how to load video and analyze it. In addition, there are many videos uploaded on Youtube by various institutions where this software is used.
Tracker is a really very useful application for analysis of experiments belonging to two branches of the physics – mechanics and optics. These topics are usually discussed at a university level course and therefore undergraduate degree students may find this software interesting. Instead of manually measuring everything using a stopwatch and measuring tape, we can just record the video of the experiments. Afterwards, we can load the video in Tracker and let it measure and calculate everything for us. Since the Tracker method is obviously much more accurate, we can eliminate the human error in experiments to a level of degree.
You can download Tracker from https://physlets.org/tracker/.