A follow-up to last week's poi math video. This one tells us how to determine the size of the hand path for poi when we're graphing out patterns using parametric equations. Includes properties of wavelength and amplitude among other nifty math concepts.

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Here's an interesting idea inspired by Mel's recent video of his workshop on snakes: I'd noticed that when he was practicing tracing along his arm that it was somewhat reminiscent of a box mode antispin flower that had been somewhat squashed. This reminded me of a concept that had been thrown out on the old Tribe tech poi group: the snake eye. This was a trick wherein you'd take a snake but perform it in antispin, theoretically creating cateyes around your shoulder. While Mel's arm tracer definitely doesn't produce a cateye, it does seem very compatible with snakes. Here's the result.

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People frequently reference the math behind poi on many forums and groups, but it can seem a little daunting to folks that don't have that kind of background. Here's an attempt to level the playing field. A lot of this will be review for the more mathematically inclined folks out there, but for those who aren't, hopefully this will give you the Cliff's Notes as to some of the math we use to describe flowers and the like and make it a little bit more digestible. If you like this, please leave me feedback as I've got plans in my mind to do a whole series of these kinds of videos :)

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There's been some chat in the past week about zero points and how they differentiate from plane bends and even whether they do so at all. Here's my take on the concept (which, rarely enough for poi seems to be very internally logical ;) and how one can think of plane changing as being something of a sliding scale where on one end the poi stops moving (zero point) and on the other the hand stops moving (orbing).

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Last video we rolled through three different approaches to defining CAPs. Here is an alternate approach to breaking down such motions: a couple years ago, Alien Jon introduced me to the idea of spinning composites. Compositing is chaining together increments of poi movement that overlap in hand and poi position to either create repeatable patterns or transition and shift seamlessly between patterns.

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The question of what constituted a CAP recently came up both in the Tech Poi and Vulcan Tech Gospel groups on Facebook. Here are what I'd consider to be the three main approaches to describing a CAP--in my next video, I'm going to detail a slightly different approach to this question and some of the cool patterns that come not from trying to classify all the CAPs, but from taking the lessons that learning CAPs provide and applying them to more complex types of motion.

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More throws for your consumption--this time a type of toss I've heard both Erik and Ted refer to as a "sneaky toss". It's something like a float throw but performed in such a way that it seems to continue a static or small extension motion, rather than requiring a loop like isolated or overhead tosses. It's an integral component in a type of toss weave I've seen Poiboi do in his videos and a fun sneaky toss switch that G showed me while he was in town. I think his version finished differently, but I like the properties the version I'm doing here has.

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A bunch of random combos I've been working on in the past couple months. The stacking stuff was based upon playing with the idea of leash tracing with the head or hand--something that came out of a move Charlie showed me at Fall WF last year, as well as maintaining right angles in the orientation of the poi to each other. The second stacking combo is very similar to the first, but there's a small difference in the timing that makes the difference between the tracing and actually having a moment where the right angle is seen in full relief.

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