Finally our childhood dreams of a working tractor beam are coming to fruition! It’s called acoustic levitation and it actually uses highly concentrated sound waves to float small objects by essentially creating an acoustic force field.
The concept is nothing new, in fact we first covered it back in 2014 — but since then they’ve made leaps and bounds in their research. Back then they could just levitate dust. Now we’re moving onto small objects, like googly-eyes! It’s perceivable that with powerful enough speakers, larger objects will soon be harnessed…
The researchers have discovered three optimum acoustic traps which allow for manipulating objects in space with nothing more than sound. If you could see sound, the array of speakers work together to create what would look like a hologram — which is the acoustic trap. The shapes they have found to work best include a tweezer-like shape, a twister-like vortex, and now a bottle shaped trap — however only the tweezers and twister have been observed experimentally, take a look:
[via Gizmodo]
Filed under: digital audio hacks
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