Sphericon—The Shape That Meanders Instead of Rolls

hey everybody today i'm going to be showing you some meandering shapes shapes that roll that seem like they shouldn't this shape is called a sphericon so the original sphericon is made like this you start off with a bicone like this a bicone just means a cone on the bottom a cone on the top but then you turn it sideways and cut it in half so you get two pieces like this and then what you do is you turn one of the pieces 90 degrees to the other one so as soon as you turn it 90 degrees something interesting happens it makes one continuous surface around the whole object so now the shape has one continuous surface and because of that watch what happens when we roll it okay now watch this thing roll the original inventor of this called it the meandering shape because as it rolls it kind of looks like it's meandering wobbling back and forth [Music] in order to make this you don't have to start with a bicone you can start with different polygons as well and when you do that you can actually get some really interesting shapes that do different motion than just zigzag back and forth you can actually get to roll back up on itself and then continue downward for example this is a design from maker's muse that uses a hexagon shape to make the spherical [Music] now what's interesting about the original spiricon is notice what it looks like so if you just look at the ridges of it this looks like a semi-circle on one side and then at 90 degrees to it there's another semi-circle so actually if you just took out the material in between and just took two semi-circles and put them together you'd actually get the same motion as this sphericon so what that means is there's a really cool way that you can make your own spherican at home just using coins okay so in order to make this you take two pennies just cut them to the center with some wire cutters and pound them flat then fit them together that's so cool or you can try the more expensive version the quarter version look at that [Music] [Music] what's neat about the coin design is that even on a non-slanted surface you can get them to roll by blowing them so the way a spherican works is basically it has only one surface if you follow your finger around the edges you'll find that it eventually makes its way all the way around the whole shape so as it rolls that surface wants to stay in contact with the ground and as it does it causes it to rock back and forth as it rolls now the same thing happens with these coins put together as well since i've turned them 90 degrees you'll notice that it doesn't matter that there's no surface in the middle here it still follows the outer surface of the coins so basically it's almost like a spherican because if you trace your finger around it you'll eventually make it back to the other side so as you can trace your finger around it you can see how it kind of rolls the coin and because the two coins make contact with the surface it doesn't matter that there's no material in between there it acts as though this were a curved surface so this is basically like a little sphericon you can see that it actually rocks back and forth hey everyone thanks for watching another episode of the action lab i hope you enjoyed it if you did don't forget to subscribe if you haven't yet and also hit the bell so you can be notified when my latest video comes out and you can also check out the actionlab.com to see the action lab experiment boxes and thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 798,167

Keywords: sphericon, hexagonal sphericon, rolling coins, coins, DIY, 3d printed, makers muse, 3d printing, the action lab, action lab

Id: nOA_VpjE0oM

Length: 5min 19sec (319 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020