Amazing! I want to see the inner workings, but that is some *quality art/engineering right there. The description said it's like a Spiro graph that uses steel balls, magnets, and sand, but how does it switch patterns?
Bruce Shapiro's works are really interesting.

*promote

not a robot then, it really is origami with a tiny magnet, moved my coils around it.

lame!

I call fake, he's clearly got some kind of magnetic machine that pulls objects towards him, and he's just playing it back in reverse. =)

I agree that the inside of the ball probably resembles a weighted arm with servo-driven rollers that can move the ball around on one end (likely the bottom) and an articulated arm on the other that has magnets that keep the head from falling off and can move it around on the ball. The head itself could be largely passive, with no ability to "move" itself.

I think the head is magnetically attracted to the ball with some powerful neo magnets, and the head has enough gyros and wheels to drive around on the ball.

I think the bottom ball has spinning gyros as well used to propel it.

Grahamslam's hamsterwheel is most likely.

Head has caster wheels and 2-3 (or more) magnets.

Body has basically a R/C car that can move sideways, and a gimbal mounted array of similar magnets to the head.

The R/C car moves everything, the gimbal moves the head. Doesn't need any segway tech, just a big weight at the bottom.

It occurs to me you could probably manage it without too much in the way of Segway-esque magic. Have the outer shell as you'd expect, basically a big hamster ball, then a second ball inside it with all the clever stuff.

For the inside inside have most of the lower half be ballast of some sort - battery packs would be ideal for that - then 8 or so wheels pushing against the outer shell so you can move in a decent number of directions (might have to retract the wheels perpendicular to the direction of movement unless there's a more elegant solution I'm missing).

Then finally for the upper half make a very smooth dome, put a little cart on it whose position you can adjust with a couple of cables, stick a couple of strong magnets on the cart (need a motor on the cart too so you can rotate the head).

This is all based on my years of not having done anything remotely connected to model building!

Magnets - how do they work?
*promote the *engineering!

Not quite, he (Donald L. Unger) won an Ig Nobel prize, a satirical version of the Nobel prize, given to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think". Basically anything that sounds way too silly but can still yield useful knowledge.

While silly, it's still (usually) all based on proper scientific method, and there's even an example of a man who first won the Ig Nobel prize in physics in 2000 (for levitating a frog with magnets), and then later went to win the Nobel prize in physics together with Konstantin Novoselov for their work on graphene. =)

What about a superconducting magnet being used to suspend a top, both in a vacuum and not?

Similar to this - which is smooth shell/continuous cross section but sadly very short in duration.

Looks (and sounds) like a magnetic Scotch & Soda set

at 1:21 you can see the table move under the ore as he moves the magnet around.

If this wasn't fake, there would be magnetic golems wandering the now desolate wasteland of earth. We would all know the sting of the magnet golem. It would be common place. Your children would walk to school with anti magnet guns and ironic, perhaps rebellious ICP t-shirts.

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