A Glowing Ball With a Pattern Two Layers of Different Opacity and a Light Inside

This application covers an air-tight recreational object, in practice a ball, built from two layers of differing opacity where the outer layer carries an aperture and an internal light module shines through it to create a pattern on the surface. The applicant is Gigglicious, LLC, a product innovation company in Avon, Indiana.

The Problem

Balls and ball-based toys are among the oldest and most reliably popular products in the world, and a large share of the play they support happens in fading light: back yards at dusk, indoor spaces, evening games. Manufacturers have long fitted illumination into balls, usually triggered by the ball being bounced, thrown, spun, kicked or caught.

The trouble is that a ball with a light inside it tends to be a ball that glows uniformly, a plain luminous sphere. It solves visibility and stops there. Getting a defined pattern onto the surface of a moving, deforming, inflated object is harder than it sounds. Printing does not glow. Mounting individual emitters where the pattern should be complicates manufacture, adds failure points and creates hard spots in something that has to stay soft and air-tight while being kicked. The engineering task is to produce a distinct illuminated pattern without giving up the simplicity, durability and feel of an ordinary inflatable ball.

What This Invention Does

The construction uses opacity as the patterning mechanism. The apparatus is an air-tight object with an outer layer and an inner layer, where the outer layer has greater opacity than the inner layer. The outer layer defines an aperture. A light module sends light from inside the object out through that aperture.

Because the outer layer blocks more light than the inner one, light escapes preferentially through the aperture, and the shape of the aperture becomes the shape of the illuminated pattern. The pattern is defined by the geometry of a layer rather than by the placement of light sources, so a single light module in the interior can produce whatever design the apertures describe. The two-layer arrangement keeps the object air-tight, since the layers work together as a wall rather than being pierced by hardware, and the pattern is created during forming rather than added afterwards.

Key Features

• Two-layer construction. The air-tight object comprises an outer layer and an inner layer.
• Opacity differential. The outer layer has greater opacity than the inner layer, which is what confines the emitted light.
• Aperture in the outer layer. The outer layer defines an aperture that determines the shape of the visible pattern.
• Internal light module. A light module directs light from the interior of the object out through the aperture.
• Air-tight integrity. The object remains inflatable and sealed despite the patterned illumination.
• Single-source patterning. The design comes from layer geometry rather than from positioning multiple emitters.

Who Is Behind It

The applicant is Gigglicious, LLC, an Indiana product innovation company founded by Ryan and Annie Wolfinbarger that develops toy, game and consumer product concepts and licenses them to manufacturers. The named inventor is Ryan Wolfinbarger, the company’s managing director, whose earlier patented work includes a pump and valve system used in a toy water gun. The application is a divisional of Australian application 2023241313 and belongs to a family that also includes Australian applications 2021229234 and 2016233907, with priority reaching back to a United States application filed in March 2015.

Why It Matters

Toy patents rarely attract the attention that pharmaceutical or telecommunications filings do, but the commercial logic behind them is much the same. Gigglicious does not manufacture at scale; it generates product concepts and licenses the strong ones. In that business model the patent is the product, because a licensee is buying an exclusive position rather than a design it could otherwise copy from a shelf.

The technical idea is also a neat one, and its neatness is the point. Using the relative opacity of two layers to shape light is a manufacturing-friendly solution: it needs no additional components, no precise placement of emitters and no compromise to the seal of an inflatable object. Solutions of that kind, where the pattern falls out of how the thing is made rather than being added to it, tend to survive contact with a factory, which is what separates a licensable concept from a clever prototype.

Related Concepts

• Ball – the product category this invention sits in.
• Light-emitting diode – the illumination technology that makes battery-powered glowing toys practical.
• Opacity (optics)) – the optical property the two-layer design exploits.
• Rotational moulding – a common manufacturing route for hollow multi-layer plastic objects.
• Toy safety – the regulatory framework governing products of this kind.
• Patent licensing – the business model behind a design-and-license product company.

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AU 2026202056 was published in the Australian Official Journal of Patents on 9 April 2026 and is open for public inspection. Patent applications represent inventions that are sought to be protected and do not necessarily reflect commercially available products.