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how to calculate a negative acceleration?

Asked 2010-02-19T18:49:13.047
10

I'm implementing the scrolling behaviour of a touch screen UI but I'm too tired in the moment to wrap my mind around some supposedly trivial piece of math:

y (distance/velocity)
|********
|        ******
|              ****
|                  ***
|                     ***
|                        **
|                          **
|                            *
|                             *
-------------------------------- x (time)

f(x)->?

The UI is supposed to allow the user to drag and "throw" a view in any direction and to keep it scrolling for a while even after he releases the finger from the screen. It's sort of having a momentum that depends on how fast the user was dragging before he took off the finger.

So I have a starting velocity (v0) and every 20ms I scroll by a amount relative to the current velocity. With every scrolling iteration I lower the velocity a bit until it falls below a threshold when I stop it. It just doesn't look right when I decrement it by a fixed amount (linear), so I need to model a negative acceleration but fail to come up with a decent simple formula how to calculate the amount by which I have to lower the velocity in every iteration.

Update:

Thank you for your responses so far but I still didn't manage to derive a satisfying function from the feedback yet. I probably didn't describe the desired solution good enough, so I'll try to give a real world example that should illustrate what kind of calculation I would like to do:

Assume there is a certain car driving on a certain street and the driver hits the brakes to a max until the car comes to a halt. The driver does this with the same car on the same street multiple times but begins to brake at varying velocities. While the car is slowing down I want to be able to calculate the velocity it will have exactly one second later solely based on it's current velocity. For this calculation it shou

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1 Answer

1

A non-linear change in velocity means that acceleration is not constant. A non-constant acceleration means that the system is under the influence of jerk. Take all your acceleration equations and add "(1/6)jt3". Fix a, and give j a small negative value until v hits 0.

answered 2010-02-20T02:57:36.720

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