When you walk up to this demo, you see a plexiglas box and inside there appears to be a 3D image of a house, rotating slowly around. Depending on which “mode” you select on a controller, the distortion to the shape of the house changes. Here are three pictures: the first is of the “haystack” visual effect and the next two are of the “zigzag” visual effect. The house image would slowly rotate, which partially explains the poor quality of my photography.

My first impression what that this was a 3D image of a house accomplished with multiple projections onto a blank surface. Totally wrong! Instead, it turns out that a single slight source, a strobe light, was being shown onto a physical model of a house that was spinning very fast. The pattern of the light alone created the visual effect. Here's a picture of the physical house (while stationary):

I took a video, which does a much better job capturing the effect, which I will try to post soon. In the meantime, here's an 360-view of the Morphovision demo, from 360VR.

This is a research project at NHK Science and Technical Research Laboratories and there is more information on Morphovision on the Siggraph website.

Update: apparently I'm not the only one blown away by this.