Disney Research Creates Impossible Spinning Tops

It isn’t easy to get an uneven object to spin, at least not for very long. We’ve all tried spinning our pen or what else is around us while on the phone or other down times. Disney Research employees must have done the same.

They have come up with a solution to make pretty much any shape spin stable for a longer period of time using 3D-printing technology. The idea behind it is, that if you have near-perfect control of the distribution of mass in an object, you can control its centre of gravity.

Using the knowledge of physics and just the right materials, Disney is able to 3D-print spinning-tops in pretty much any shape they can think of. In the demonstration video we see everything from spinning teapots, elephants, action figures and dancing Buddha’s.

The technique is quite impressive, and it isn’t hard to imagine how this will be turned into profit by the Cartoon giant. Sadly, it doesn’t look like any of the toys demonstrated in the video are going to be released for us to play with, that dancing Buddha was kinda cool.

Thank you TechCrunch for providing us with this information.

Image and video courtesy of Disney.