Joaquin Baldwin is a director, animator and layout artist living in Los Angeles, California (born in Paraguay). He currently works for Walt Disney Animation Studios doing CG layouts. He’s also won over 130 awards for his short films which you can find on his personal website Pixel Nitrate.

In this fun little pet project, Baldwin transferred the entire first level of the iconic Super Mario Bros. onto a Mobius strip. He then took it one step further and created it using a 3D printer, making things like the bricks, goombas and koopas all raised. It’s pretty sweet and you can even buy your own mobius strip on Shapeways*.

According to Wikipedia:

A Mobius is a surface with only one side and only one boundary component. If an ant for example, were to crawl along the length of this strip, it would return to its starting point having traversed the entire length of the strip (on both sides of the original paper) without ever crossing an edge. Cutting a Mobius strip along the center line with a pair of scissors yields one long strip with two full twists in it, rather than two separate strips.

 

As for how Baldwin was able to create this piece, he remarks:

“I used an image of the whole map and used it as a texture for a plane inside Maya. Then I twisted the plane 180 degrees on the long axis, and bent it around its vertical axis by a factor of 3.1416, that made it into a mobius strip. I color-separated the image in Photoshop and made the sky black, the bricks white, and the in-between shapes in shades of gray, and used that to displace the plane geometry.
 
It was a very heavy file because of this, 100Mb for a simple loop, since there are millions of displaced polygons. Then I uploaded my file to Shapeways, and they 3d-printed it in full-color, with a crazy high resolution.” [Source]

 

[Reddit via Neatorama]