Pop culture is famous for showing opera singers testing their range by attempting to break a glass, using only their voices. The Slo Mo Guys take that experiment just a little further in a video they recently uploaded to their YouTube channel.
Slo Mo Guys
Using the wine glasses resin frequency, host Gavin Free captures the shattering at a rate of 187,500 frames per second. This is to detail, not the shatter itself, but the process of that shattering. The frame rate is approximately 7500x slower than the human eye, which catches the most intricate of breaks.
Running a tone generator app on an old iPad, Free is able to find the frequency to play loudly at the glass. He takes the frequency, feeds it through an amp to a small compression driver, with a sliced PVC pipe attached to it. The amp is then aimed directly at the glass.
Using a piece of paper to detect the right frequency (the paper makes the vibrations more noticeable), the host then gets the right frequency and blasts it. Filmed with a Phantom 7510, the video then captures the moment the vigorously shaking wine glass shatters at an astonishing 187,500 frames per second.
The result? An amazing slow-motion play that shows in detail, breakage by breakage. Although the glass completely shatters in less than a second, the footage captured would take almost two hours to watch. In that span of time, you’d be able to see every crack appear and start to slowly spread across the glass.
To watch the moment the glass starts to fall apart, start the video around 2:11 to see how the vibration starts to affect the glass. Then watch as little specks of glass start spattering off, to meet their ultimate demise.
Next time you see a character try to make a glass break, think about this video, and be amazed at the science of it all!