I met Emily Whiting (one of the authors) earlier this year; she had a few of the fabricated tops with her at the time and I spent a few minutes playing with them. It should be noted that while these are much easier to spin than un-optimized solids (which don’t spin at all), they are still much, much harder to spin than normal tops.

Still, it’s a cool little project.

If they can extend their work to forms that can be reproduced with injection-molding, the asymmetric yo-yos will make an attractive novelty.

for some of the simpler shapes they could probably injection mold multiple pieces and weld them together. For the more complicated ones, they could insert the cast weights into the injection molding machine and inject around them.

Ok, this is cool, but what is the use to Disney of this research?

Toys. Also as a general research institute being cool probably makes a research project worthy already.

Possibly also useful for their animatronics in Disney World. I could see it being used to help model a ballroom scene.

It's an application of 3D printing, so it could be monetizable in a hypothetical near future when cheap printers are starting to be common but content is still scarce.

E.g. Dad buys a 3D printer, prints customized spinnable toys for all of little Adam's favorite Cars characters. When Mom asks why Dad spent all that money on a stupid printer, Dad can point to Adam playing with his new spinning toys.

"Honey, these are unique, you can't make these except by 3D printing. And look, they've got Adam's name embossed on them!"

To judge by the number of researchers from Disney Zurich who were on the road giving job talks this spring, it seems that Disney may be asking the same question.

It's a bit of a stretch to call this research. It's basically an engineering project to develop toys.

What then is the research barrier they need to cross? I'm genuinely curious. This seems more "researchy" than a lot of other items I've read (such as optimizing a planar antenna geometry with included matching network et. variants) to me, but I'm perfectly fine with a very blurry engineering/research line.

There is "research"--in which one is poring over an existing body of knowledge and possibly "tweaking around the edges" to investigate properties described therein, conducting surveys to gauge response (e.g. "market research"), and the like. This kind of research is a superficial investigation into well-established, well-known subject matter, possibly with an interesting approach or to find a context-specific answer to a question, but not one that fundamentally adds to the body of knowledge.

Then there is "research"--in which one is exploring a new, known but unexplored, or a known, previously investigated but complex problem in a novel way with the intent to expose previously unknown properties and add to the body of knowledge. This is the kind of "research", e.g., physicists, mathematicians, and some engineers do.

I hazard a guess, without knowing for sure, the parent sees a "barrier" between these two kinds of research, and that he'd place this article in the first category rather than the latter.

Yup. This is basic engineering as taught early in any mechanical engineering curriculum. That's all I meant. It's still cool and worth while, I just don't see anything that separates it from any other application of basic theory. It's no more research than building a ruby on rails website.

It's not scientific research, but the word "research" covers a much broader set of investigations than just science. For example going to the library to look up sources for an academic paper is commonly called research.