If you like this and you haven't seen 1000fps flatland tricks:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHrn3-Cb3iM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHrn3-Cb3iM</a>
I really like the overlay of physics information in the video. It is so much easier to explain to students what acceleration is by <i>showing</i> it rather than asking students to imagine "the second derivative of the position function r(t)=(x(t),y(t))."<p>Check out the software they used: <a href="http://www.cabrillo.edu/~dbrown/tracker/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cabrillo.edu/~dbrown/tracker/</a>
For anyone trying to learn how to do an ollie for the first time, the one thing that really helped me was this: do it on grass. I spent ages on concrete, and it is a lot harder. On grass the board doesn't roll and you don't get hurt if you fall.<p>A bit like learning to walk on your hands - start in a shallow pool. Once you get comfortable with the motion translating it to a different surface is not that hard.
I never got any good ollies in high school. Watching the vids and reading the article I think I realized something I never understood. It looks like most of the skater's upward body acceleration is coming from using the the _left_ leg, with the right foot going along for the ride (and smacking the tail down). I always tried to get the major jumping lift from my right leg, while also somehow smacking the tail at the same time. I think I've always had it backwards!
You don't actually need any fancy software to see what's going on if you've mastered the fine art of free body diagrams: <a href="http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1374" rel="nofollow">http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1374</a> (not related to skateboards, but those damned wobbly suitcases).<p>And the advantage of simple free body diagrams is they are amenable to relatively simple models, frequently involving simple harmonic motion: <a href="http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1410" rel="nofollow">http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1410</a><p>These are teachable skills, and while it's great we have software to help us out, I'm a sufficiently aged crustacean to see the value in learning to do these sorts of analyses formally, by observation and inference.
It looks like the skater drags his shoes against the "lip" of the skateboard to get a bit more "forward" direction on takeoff, pulling it upwards.
The motion capture shown is kind of limited. The wheels are tracked, but not the CG of the rider. Also, the video doesn't show the beginning of the ollie. It looks like, in this one, the rider did this entirely by loading up the springs in the trucks to get a bounce, rather than dragging the tail of the board.<p>It's a good physical simulation problem. Now that Gazebo has a real physics engine (by Mike Sherman from Stanford) rather than ones from video games, it should be possible to do an ollie in a robot simulation. (The game-type physics engines use an impulse/constraint model for contacts, which is unrealistic when you have a collision followed by sliding.)