Zorb Ball Popularity is Rolling Across America
Whether you're walking on water, challenging yourself or a friend on an obstacle course, or rolling downhill, it's pretty difficult to not have a tremendous amount of fun while zorbing.
A zorb ball is a large inflated, flexible plastic ball that a person can climb inside of. It's basically an oversized inflatable hamster ball for humans, though not with the hard shell the rodent variety has. They can be used on grass, snow, ice, or even water.
Innovative "zorbers" have concocted all sorts of fun games to use zorb balls in. Zorb ball soccer, water zorbing and other water games, zorb sumo wrestling ... people have been exceptionally creative with the ways they use zorb balls, and we're really only just beginning to see their full potential for fun activities.
Zorbing has appeared in a slew of popular internet videos (like this Youtube video showing the zorb ball Magnus effect) and on TV shows. They're starting to become a sort of pop culture phenom. And the more people are exposed to them through social media and elsewhere, the more popular they're becoming. And as a product offered by a rental business, each flexible plastic ball you lease out has the potential to bring in huge profits.
The zorb ball craze may just be "the next big thing" for the event rentals industry. And as zorb ball technology improves over time, so too will rental potential. So the question you may want to ask is this: how long should your event rentals or party rentals company wait before hopping on the zorb ball bandwagon?
The History of Zorbing
These bubble balls may seem like a new invention, but they've actually been around on the commercial market for more than two decades. And as a concept, they've been around a lot longer than that.
The first human-sized inflated ball as we know them today was invented in 1975 by French architect Gilles Ebersolt. Ebersolt, who was just a teenager when he came up with the idea, created a ball that he called his "Ballule" (French for "Bubble"). The Ballule used inverted vacuum cleaners for pressurization, but otherwise was essentially the same as a modern zorb ball.
Ebersolt's Ballule was registered with the Conseil de Prud'hommes, and appeared on television internationally in the 1970's and 1980's, but he never made his invention into a commercial inflatable product.
Jackie Chan found himself inside an inflated ball in the 1991 film Operation Condor, where the action star rolls down the side of a mountain in a death-defying stunt. It's unknown whether Chan used one of Ebersolt's Ballules or if his special effects team created one ... or if Chan was even inside the ball when it went down the mountain (please never, ever try this, folks).
In the early 1990's, the TV show American Gladiators featured rigid human hamster balls in a game they called "Atlasphere." Contestants would roll their spheres into scoring areas while "gladiators" worked to keep them out of those zones in an epic game of bumper ball. But these weren't really the same as a Ballule; they had hard, rigid frames and were more like a cage than a bubble.
The "zorb ball" name comes from Andrew Akers and Dwayne van der Sluis of Rotorua, New Zealand, who founded the company Zorb Limited in 1994. The Zorb company created the world's first commercial human hamster ball, as well as the first zorbing park.
Zorb Ball Design
Akers and van der Sluis may have popularized the phrases "zorb ball" and "zorbing," but their design isn't substantially different from the one created by Gilles Ebersolt twenty or so years earlier. They haven't fundamentally changed much since then, either.
A zorb ball's design is pretty simple on paper (though a bit harder to manufacture, of course). It's essentially one vinyl or PVC ball wrapped inside a second, larger ball. Those balls are connected via hundreds of small nylon strings. The exterior ball is then inflated with a commercial blower.
The user enters the inner ball through a tunnel-like tube. Some balls have one entrance, and some have two. One or both entrances can be sealed off with a "donut," an additional inflatable that plugs up the entry tubes.
Unplugged, the zorb ball can be used on grass, ice, snow, hills, and almost any other surface (just be careful not to get it scuffed up on pavement). If plugged with a donut, the zorb ball becomes airtight and can be safely used on water. Some water zorbing enthusiasts will put a little bit of water inside the ball, too—just enough to splash around—for some added fun.
Zorbing Games
It wasn't long after the advent of zorb balls that people started coming up with innovative ways to have fun with them. Zorb parks have sprung up all around the world in recent years (even a few here in the United States), often hosting a variety of indoor and outdoor activities for whole families.
One of the most popular inflated ball games is also probably the simplest: climbing into a ball and rolling down a huge hill. Yep, that's all there is too it. And you'd be surprised to find out just how ridiculously fun rolling downhill actually is, too.
Most specialist parks and "gravity parks" internationally feature some form of downhill experience. If you don't have a gravity park near you, you can always use a grass hill with a gentle slope (again, don't do anything dangerous!). Most hills used for sledding in winter months should be safe for zorbing.
Another popular game is zorb ball wrestling, where two "combatants" roll into each other, sometimes on a track, and attempt to knock each other out of a specified area. It's sort of like sumo wrestling, only inside human hamster balls.
Zorb ball soccer is spreading not only as a fun game, but as a sport some are starting to take seriously. Known internationally as "zorb ball football," zorb soccer involves players running and rolling in their inflated balls, sometimes with their feet inside or outside of the balls, and moving soccer balls around the pitch as well. There was even a "Bubble Football World Cup" in 2018.
The Zorb Ball Revolution is Coming. Are You Ready?
"Zorbing" was added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary in 2001, just a few years after the phrase itself was coined. And that fact stands as a testament to the rapid international growth of the commercial human-filled inflatable ball.
Despite frenzied growth on the international level, however, zorbing didn't really take off here in North America until much more recently. It took a slew of internet videos and TV appearances for the zorb ball to really get noticed here. But noticed they most certainly did get.
Human hamster balls are in high demand in some North American markets, and that demand seems to be spreading over time. So it should come as no surprise then that many experienced party and event rental businesses are investing in them today. They're not just fun outdoor toys, but profitable rental units as well.
These fun balls have been around long enough that we know they aren't just a fad. And these products have been used enough to know they're overall quite safe, despite a few unfortunate accidents with them over the years (often due to human error). So as rental business investments they're exceptionally sound, so long as you live in a market that's open to trying them, of course.
The zorbing phenomenon is one that isn't going away anytime soon. An outdoor activity that can be played on grass or in a pool, that's enjoyable by all ages? Games like that don't come along all too often. If you're experienced enough in the event rentals space to know how to get good use out of them, investing in zorb balls is a perfectly rational events business decision. And let's be honest, folks ... you sort of want to try riding them around yourself, right?