Welcome to the Zoetrope Yo-yo page. A very silly/geeky yo-yo mod.

Don't know what a zoetrope is? Do not worry, you're not alone.

My guess is that 99% of the people have no clue as to what a zoetrope is. 0.8% probably know what it is and will recognize it on sight, although they probably never knew the correct name. The remaining 0.2% are those who took "Animation 101" or who are simply geek enough to have those random bits of knowledge.

Check this page to see what the original zoetrope was.

Anyway, I've always been a bit disappointed with yo-yo paintings. Most of them look great when the yo-yo is sitting still, but everything becomes a blur when the yo-yo is actually spinning, so I decided to try to get some effects using the yo-yo's spin.

One of the few ideas that came to my mind was the zoetrope.

Although the zoetrope is used primarily for animations, the typical zoetrope spins at less than 100 rpm, while the yo-yo can reach 5000 rpm on an average throw. So instead of an animation running at 20 or 30 frames per second, the Zoetrope Yo-yo would have an animation at 1000 or 1500 frames per second. Since the number of animation frames is extremely limited (8 in this version), the animation becomes a blur except when the yo-yo is almost dead at under 100rpm.

So the solution was to use an animation where all 8 frames look the same, which gives us a 1000 fps animation of a static image. :) It does look kinda cool, because the logo doesn't seem to be spinning with the yo-yo.

The picture on the right is how the Zoetrope Yo-yo looks like at this time. The paper strips behind it are some of the animation tests.

Click here to see it spinning (you'll need Quicktime or some other MJPEG [not MPEG!] codec to view it).

You can see one of the animations here. You can see it working just like the original zoetrope, spinning at a very slow rate.

Unfortunately the whole thing is still too cumbersome to be playable. :) A very good version can probably be made by cutting the slits on the yo-yo half itself. A BigYo 2 or something as big is probably the best for this. And it needs to be black on the outside as well.

Well, enough geekiness for a day. Thanks for reading. :)

red.