A hole in your basketball is typically not a good thing, but Wilson’s bizarre new Airless basketball prototype treats them as a feature. Indeed, it’s probably more hole than ball, and yet it’s said to bounce and respond like a regulation NBA rock.
Like many of the airless tire concepts we’ve seen, Wilson’s airless ball maintains its bounce using a highly engineered elastic structure instead of pneumatic pressure. In this case, the company went with a series of hexagonal holes, arranged into a 3D lattice, while also replicating the typical binding pattern of a leather ball, so players can get their fingers into the seams as per normal.
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A structure this complex can only be 3D-printed, so that’s what Wilson did, in some kind of “research-grade” polymer material, which was then coated in black, and sent off to Wilson’s “NBA test facility in Ada, Ohio,” for “rigorous testing.”
Read more: New Atlas
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