Researchers at the University of Sussex have become the first in the world to develop technology which can bend sound waves around an obstacle and levitate an object above it.
Researchers at the University of Sussex have become the first in the world to develop technology which can bend sound waves around an obstacle and levitate an object above it.
SoundBender, developed by Professor Sriram Subramanian, Dr Gianluca Memoli and Dr Diego Martinez Plasencia at the University of Sussex, is an interface capable of producing dynamic self-bending beams that enable both levitation of small objects and tactile feedback around an obstacle.
The technology, to be presented at the 31st ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium in Berlin this Monday (15 October), overcomes two key limitations of previous ultrasound levitation set-ups, which were unable to create sound fields of similar complexity and could not bypass obstacles that lay between the transducers and the levitating object.
Dr Memoli, Lecturer in Novel Interfaces and Interactions at the University of Sussex, said: “This is a significant step forward for ultrasound levitation and overcomes a significant drawback that has been hampering development in this field. We have achieved incredibly dynamic and responsive control, so real-time adjustments are just one step away."
Read more at University of Sussex
Image: Dr. Gianluca Memoli and Mohd Adili Norasikin of the University of Sussex with SoundBender. (Credit: University of Sussex)
