It's a Wash

[This post contains flashing images after the break. Photosensitive folks may want to skip it.]

I recently got this question from my Aunt Linda: I hate my washing machine because it is always off balance and knocks the shit out of itself. So I stare through the clear lid and try and figure out which piece of clothes is causing the problem. It really is trial and error. So I was thinking that the design should include 4 quadrant color distribution and help. Then I thought how fast the rotation is and where to spread out the different colors so they create the illusion of coming together visually by the timing of when the color is matching. Would there be a formula that would work at giving rotation and circumference?

Similar to a previous post on flickering lights, this question brings us into the field of psychophysics. I liked Linda's idea of using a color scale, so I decided to try animating an HSV color wheel with a wobble:

As Linda says, it's difficult to line up the color with the motion. My idea was to try to cut out the extra info by focusing on only a central slit. We can add some scale lines as well to help:

Now we can see pretty clearly that the red points are the heavy ones, pulling the washer out of alignment. Problem solved, right?

Sadly not. The images above are animated GIFs, which have a maximum frame rate of 100 frames per second. Washers on the other hand, tend to spin at over 1000 RPM. For the points I show, that would require 833 frames per second. We can get around the limit by exporting the animation as a giant block of HTML, but the result is pretty dizzying, so I'm going to paste it after the break. Thanks for a great question, Linda, though I wish I could have given you a more satisfying answer.