I can’t figure out how they would be able to fake this. It’s insane really.
If it’s real my only guess is that they start out by bouncing the ball in a set pattern for 10-100 times to get the force and angle repeatable and THEN put the cup in the spot where the ball has landed/hit the largest % of time.
Anyone?
It doesn’t have to be faked.
It doesn’t look like it requires any more hand-eye coordination than, say, shooting pool. Pool sharks can make all kinds of amazing shots that make the onlooker go, “Wow, how’d he do that?” but it’s just a matter of practice.
Yeah, sure, obviously you just toss a pingpong ball around, bounce it off things, make note of where it lands, then put a cup there.
The video is edited, so they’re only showing you the shots where the ball makes it into the cup. There’s no way of knowing, for example, how many times he had to aim at the cup on the rolling skateboard before he actually got it in, or the shot where he tosses it behind him in the dining room.
I agree. It’s probably just the combination of a lot of practice and a lot of attempts.
Okay, but how did he get the ping-pong ball to take off from the treadmill? 
My vote is for faked. Sure, it might be possible, after thousands of trials, to achieve these feats, but it’s far simpler to have the pingpong ball already in the receptacle and ‘disappear’ the one that’s thrown. If you check some of the shots you can see the moment the ball is erased.
I don’t think the video quality is good enough to be able to say things like this with any certainty. The poor frame rate alone makes it look like the ball disappears at times (even when it’s not near the cup).
This commercial (see below) is supposed to have been achieved by simply trying it over and over and over again, about 600 times. As far as I know, there have been no serious challenges to this assertion, although you might think it’s all conputer-animated when you first see it. Of course, these people were being paid, but it still proves what can be done with enough patience.
Honda Cog Commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcr6ZIVi-Vg
Good point, and it appears from the above post that I was mistaken anyway. That’s astonishing, I take my hat off to them, if but for their patience alone.
The Telegraph reports it was real:
'Filming was done over four near-sleepless days in a Paris studio, after one month of script approval, two months of concept drawings and a further four months of development and testing. One of the more surprising things about the ad is that it was not a cheat. Although it would have been much easier to fiddle the chain of events by using computer graphics, the seesaw and shunt of events really did happen, and in one, clean take. ’
Actually I read somewhere that there is one edit point in that advert, simply because the studio was not long enough to have it all laid out in one go. They had two halves of it set up, and each half worked as you see with no trickery. The join was added in later.
Wikipedia: "The two-minute commercial appears as a single, long camera dolly along a Rube Goldberg machine chain reaction arrangement of parts from the car but is in fact two stitched together, the join being at the moment where the muffler/exhaust box rolls across the floor (this can be seen by watching the floor pattern change). "