Japanese scientists sticks LED in an ultrasonic levitator, adds a coil.

[mikeselectricstuff]

So take an ultrasonic levitator, shove a small LED in and add a coil to couple some power to it and make something totally useless.
Maybe it was intended as Chind?gu but then the university got excited...

Note highly sophisticated notes on whiteboard in background...


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-lights-floating/japanese-scientists-invent-floating-firefly-light-idUSKCN1G7132

[Cyberdragon]

 

IDIOTS!

I think we only need to reference uBeam to understand how demonstrably terrible ultrasound is.

[mikeselectricstuff]

I'm not sure why this is "dodgy technology." Seems like a fun experiment to combine ultrasonic levitation with inductive power transmission on a really tiny scale. Does everything need to have a practical or profitable purpose?

Of course not, but they are presenting it as a serious research project with potential uses, which is clearly ridiculous

[jonovid]

be positive,  new display technology is always interesting. even if it has no immediate use at this point in time. 

[Twoflower]

Similar approach, but different: Using ultra sonic to levitate a small particle and shine light on it. This way you can use RGB light to have a full colour volumetric display. Still I would be careful and check the paper (behind a paywall) to see how many pixel (voxel?) they can address per second. With cameras you can easily cheat here. But it looks impressive!

[Someone]

Similar approach, but different: Using ultra sonic to levitate a small particle and shine light on it. This way you can use RGB light to have a full colour volumetric display. Still I would be careful and check the paper (behind a paywall) to see how many pixel (voxel?) they can address per second.

So you don't need to pay, they claim
1,307 vertices traced at 12.8 frames per second, which corresponds to 16,700 points per second
and
a particle velocity of 164?mm/s
Which they believe can be increased by an order of magnitude, so its got some scaling possibilities.

[Twoflower]

So you don't need to pay, they claim
1,307 vertices traced at 12.8 frames per second, which corresponds to 16,700 points per second
and
a particle velocity of 164?mm/s
Which they believe can be increased by an order of magnitude, so its got some scaling possibilities.

Thanks for the additional information. I haven't spend too much time to look at other places. I had the link to the Nature article and the link to the video. And found it fitting in here pretty well.

That 16.7kpts/s sounds impressive, but that only allows line art graphics. Even a magnitude more won't help much. If you want to display a plane of 100pixel by 100pixel at 25frames you're already at 250kpts/s. And my gut feeling is that's probably the limit you can force through the air using ultrasonic waves.

And probably line art graphics are the only usable style that display might be used for. As you can't display opaque areas. For example displaying a sphere you see both surfaces. So a volumetric display of Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan would look rather odd.

Don't get me wrong. That's really impressive what they've done there.