You know when you’re standing right next to the speaker, front left, obviously, and that bass just hits you. Every element of your body vibrates and the trance-like manipulation takes over. Well, that’s the power of sound waves. So powerful in fact that the theories of their manipulation of solid objects has been hypothesised for decades. And now, it’s a reality.

Anyways, some dudes (engineers) have just invented a device that can levitate tiny objects using only the power of sound. Yes, sound. It’s also called a sonic tractor beam and could be the future of touch screens made of millions of moving, 3-D pixels. In fact, in the future, the technology could be used to suspend and manipulate tiny structures inside the human body, clearing blood clots with ease. Boom, science.

Sound waves might not be the be-all and end-all in levitation tech.

I think it is important to explore all the different technologies for contactless manipulation. In the past, our hands were our main tool to manipulate objects but we need new tools for solving today’s challenges.

Different fields can exert forces on remote objects. And each field has its advantages and disadvantages. Magnetic levitation is powerful but restricted in reach, not very controllable and limited on the materials that can be levitated. Optical levitation exerts very weak forces, and quantum levitation even weaker ones. Using sound waves has several advantages: sound waves have the best ratio of input power to exerted force. Sound can travel through air, water and human tissue.

Actually, sound levitation isn’t new – NASA (duh) has been using it since the 60s. But this new device is able to manipulate objects without having to fully surround them with sound.

Instead, 64 miniature loudspeakers at the base of the object are used to create high-pitched and high-intensity sound waves, surrounding the object with high intensity sound. These sound waves create a force field strong enough to hold objects smaller than a millimeter. By manipulating the speaker output, the researchers can make the object stay still, move, or rotate.

Also, the lower the frequency, the larger the object, which could have an effect on human’s ears:

For instance if you want to levitate a soccer ball, the necessary sound waves will be dangerous for human hearing.

We are exploring how to manipulate thousands of particles individually. This would enable the development of 3-D displays composed of millions of levitating particles that act as tangible pixels.

Although we keep talking about ‘the future’ it seems like that future is pretty much here.

[source: washingtonpost]