Acoustic levitation is not new—scientists have been able to lift a water drop up and down in the air using sound waves for quite a long time. But that’s only moving a particle over a fixed axis, only going up or down. In a new research paper, Yoichi Ochiai, Takayuki Hoshi, and Jun Rekimoto have gone a lot further, developing a method to move objects in 3D space:
“Our manipulation system has two original features. One is the direction of the ultrasound beam, which is arbitrary because the force acting toward its centre is also utilised. The other is the manipulation principle by which a localised standing wave is generated at an arbitrary position and moved three-dimensionally by opposed and ultrasonic phased arrays. We experimentally confirmed that various materials could be manipulated by our proposed method.”
via Gizmodo
January 3, 2014
