Description

Here is my submission statement:

There has been a lot of critique on the egg video, and so far I haven't seen any good analysis yet. Although I would not say that I am qualified to do such analysis, I gave it a shot anyway.

So using RhinoCAD, I imported a couple screen shots of the video, one where it is on the ground, and one where it is still hanging above the ground. I used known (approximate) dimensions of the egg itself and the rope/tether to create the scene to scale as best I could.

I used the two images in tandem to reference eachother and see what I could figure out. Mostly I might have figured out where the light was coming from approximately by moving around a spotlight in the 3D environment until I got the shadows to match pretty closely to what is shown in the video. By guessing and checking I think I figured it out. What does this tell us? I dunno.... the light seems to be further away than I expected and fairly high up. If I did all this right then the light source was approximately 500' away and 250 feet in the air. This was a surprise to me as I figured it was going to be a light from a vehicle on the ground from a closer distance. I dont think this is possible based on my analysis. Of course all of this is based off of the only available scaling I had which was again the size of the egg and length of tether; so this is all very rough.

I didn't spend a ton of time on this., but thought it would be fun to try. What can you guys do with this information? I am happy to provide the CAD file to anyone who wants to take it from here.


EDIT: I also figured out roughly the sizing of the tarp, just for fun. It is roughly 40'x10' if the egg approximation is correct.