Compact holographic sound fields enable rapid one-step assembly of matter in 3D | Hacker News Reader

Compact holographic sound fields enable rapid one-step assembly of matter in 3D

science.org

288 pointstaubek72 comments

This is one of those cool ideas that is much easier to grasp with some animated visuals. I haven't found one for this specific application, but adjacent work in using sound to move small objects is seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpNbyfxxkWE , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MXVSdXZzpc , and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzWP-NL3Lck

Controlling the motion involves a lot of prediction and wave modeling, which should be a perfect application for high-performance computing.

Wow!

https://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/presentations/...

In the Supplementary Materials, there's a set of example videos of this work in action. In particular, the helix shape is pretty cool to see form in (essentially) the blink of an eye.

https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/sciadv.adf6182/sup...

Here's a kit you can buy, for a single point version: https://a.co/d/bZVnuOS

Neat! The paper slightly reminds me of imagining what would happen if you tossed a big handful of dry sand into the path of the ultrasound in the product you linked.

I’d guess you’d be politely but firmly asked to leave the lab. :P

Reminds me of Kryptonian tech in Man of Steel

This is exactly what this reminded me of. I can forsee high fidelity solid, textured holograms just being some kind of colour changing liquid that's controlled with sound waves.

Perhaps 100 years into the future we will have dynamic furniture at a whim in our houses through some kind of similar technology .. or be able to materialize dynamic cooking pots exactly suitable for each dish, and then de materialize them afterwards (skip cleaning!), rather than store 20-odd differently sized pots.

I was thinking maybe some day an artist could release concept album that, with a little material added in a stereo field, animates material into a 3D moving scene, like a hologram movie except with real stuff.

That’s assuming we would still have pots or a need for them with this tech.

I see a micro LED assembly solution

drop it down to mems mirror like dmd

This kinda reminds me of Terence McKenna talking about his experience with DMT.

He met "self-replicating machine elves". One of them told him, "don't be stuck in shock/wonder", and "do what we're doing".

Then he noticed that these 'beings' were creating various 'physical' objects in front of him with sound. Like they were "singing" these objects into existence. He called it, "glossolalia", or "speaking in tongues".

Through his DMT trips he apparently learned to use different sounds to create objects in front of him. Slight changes in the sound changed the appearance of the object.

Not that I necessarily believe him, but it peaks my imagination in fun ways.

If you ever do psychedelics, try out a tone generator while on the trip. https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/

In particular the 20-100 hz range.

There's a simple explanation for all of this. The sound wave frequencies are about coincident with the brain wave frequencies used in representing conscious thought. Signals of audio and visual perception in the brain are meant to be similar, you want to recognize the same object as the cause of both light and sound signals. So perhaps information in the optical nerve is serialized in a manner that makes the wave form similar to sound waves coming from the same direction and same characteristic length scale. Of course on psychedelics you can use sound or perhaps even blinking lights to create erroneous perceptions.

There was an art piece (at Burning Man, where else haha) that replicated this to some degree - simply a chill couch/bed thing that'd comfortably fit about five, with headset microphones and a projector, which'd visualize the sound.

And... however they put it together, it was magic. You really did feel like you were singing shapes into existence with your friends.

Ooh Fascinating!

I definitely did not see that one!

Any recollection about which year/camp/approximate location on playa/name of project/pics or similar?

Oh jeez. I think that was 2013, and I think outer playa, but not deep playa - past the temple where things get calmer and more isolated, but not way the fuck out there.

I have no idea of the names involved :/ I might be able to recover it, as I think it was by some friends of friends.

Pretty sure that is the Electric Lazy Lounge

I love the electric lazy, but that's not it :) The lazy is passive (you experience it while it happens), this was interactive.

PS - Did you know you can get a portable version? It's just the goggles, plus the sound/visual combos. (Or, at least, you used to be able to, haven't checked in years).

Many people see DMT elves. You can hear some of McKenna's quotes in Shpongle's songs ("A New Way to Say Hoo-ray".

And of course, in the Silmarillion, Eru Iluvatar "sings" the universe into form and creates deities that form harmonies (and then, dissonance).

Arguably also the bible is saying this too: "In the beginning was the Word"

This (the "Logos" translated as "the Word") is just the New Testament cribbing straight out of Hellenistic Judaism (cuz in fact early Xianity was just a Jewish sect). In particular, Philo of Alexandria.

In high school we analyzed Genesis from a literature perspective and god definitely doesn't SING the world into being, he speaks it. ANd then sees that it is good. This included Genesis "2" (the second origin story)

The spoken word is still vibrations though

Probably, the burning bush was one of the many species of tree to naturally contain DMT. It was burning at a normal pace, their sense of time was wrong. Wheels within wheels.

I've seen a similar explanation of the nature of thoughts: "the world of thoughts is the world of sound, each thought appears as a hollow shape emitting a unique sound, which appears to support that shape". In modern teems, that's very similar to a radiospace filled with signals and noise, each signal encoding a shape, everyone has a transmitter and a receiver that uses some well known method to translate shapes to signals. It helps that the signals space has infinitely many dimensions.

piques

thank you <3 I always make this same dang mistake lol

Would this also work by using the accoustic field on the material that instead of air, was suspended in a liquid? It seems like it's using the relative densities of the materials anyway, so whether it's sound through air or another medium seems equivalent.

Figure 6 shows the method with gel particles. If I'm interpreting it right, it's suspended on a liquid (I most likely am wrong).

Can someone summarize the advance relative to the prior art? There is quite a bit of previous work in this space including PixieDust (siggraph 2014) [0].

[0] https://youtu.be/NLgD3EtxwdY

The use of ultrasound holograms rather than an array of transducers. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19755

Interesting!

The current design seems to uses 3 transducers at 2.25 MHz with a static phase shifter added on top of the transducers. Then they capture floating / dropping particles which are moving past the design that they want to be printing.

I am currently working on building a similar mechanism as a pet project, inspired by the SonicSurface[1], with the goal of having a dynamic hologram while not requiring a huge computer hidden in the back.

[1] https://www.instructables.com/SonicSurface-Phased-array-for-...

Cool, Sonic Screwdrivers

One more step on the road to programmable matter.

I can imagine this being used with some form of acoustically hardening resin. Put it in a container where the walls are ultrasonic transducers and then make the wave interact in such a way as to create acoustic hotspots that harden the material

I've thought this would be cool to with radio heating. The wavelengths are smaller so you should be able to get better accuracy

I don't think that's even necessary! You could use this acoustic technique to shape ordinary light-curing resin and then flash with UV light to harden it.

This combined with zero gravity seems most promising

What do you mean? For VR?

Space

This is cymatics!

So they are using sound waves to form very exact force-fields in 3D. But when you throw matter in there, would that not interact and reflect all the waves in unpredictable ways, destroying the very exact force-field pattern they are trying to achieve?

Did everybody skip over the part about it working with biological cells? This seems like a big step towards printing organs.

One step closer to transporter technology

One step closer to hologram technology... "Help me Obi-wan you're our only hope."

And now just do it with microwave and you have instant 3d printer :)

This is a very cool idea, I hope it scales

All this math. Thank God for science.

Nobody tell Ted Faro.

Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

It occurred to me last week that phrase is prompt engineering. He is giving the essential info to specify what he wants presumably because a shorter specification would yield a different result.

I wonder if star trek replicators are deterministic.

Does Picards frequent ordering of Tea Early Grey Hot make the probability of someone ordering "tea" more likely to be TEGH, and thus if Picard ordered TEGH frequently enough he would eventually be able to just say "tea"? Do replicators do continuous training or is the prompt inference engine static?

>It occurred to me last week that phrase is prompt engineering. He is giving the essential info to specify what he wants presumably because a shorter specification would yield a different result.

I think it's less that and more to illustrate Picard's personality traits and command style for the viewer - precise, methodical, practical, no nonsense. The computers in Star Trek are perfectly capable of understanding casual language (unless the plot demands otherwise.) Picard could simply tell the replicator what he wants when he says "tea" as if he were telling a waiter at a restaurant and it would work just fine, but he prefers giving an exact specification.

https://i.redd.it/6ro1i6qar7s91.jpg

> I wonder if star trek replicators are deterministic.

It seems like it would be deterministic (or similarly consistent to your fav cafe), or else Picard would no longer trust his prompt and try new ones (no different than you would try new local cafes instead).

What isn't clear is if "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." is the same as "Hot earl grey tea, please."

It isn't different. It's just that the implication is that you need to talk to the replicator tersely rather than conversationally

Deterministic for sure, that's why he always specifies hot. Though ChatGPT would infer it's hot due to the strong statistical correlation and proximity in it's linguistic training data (at least most of the time... probably, depending on the weather)... but in the future people have learned that it's a bad idea to trust language models alone, and although the singularity has occurred (Data), he'd rather not spend his time processing Picard's drink orders.

My theory is that hot and earl gray require specific instruction every time because they are dangerous and disgusting. It should never serve earl gray by default no matter how often it is ordered.

"I'm sorry, but I am an AI language model and do not have the ability to make or serve tea. Is there anything else I can assist you with?"

But since it gives different results for different people, has anyone actually received a cup of tea?

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/2570/

There really is an xkcd for everything!

Earl Grey tea on command would be nice, but Quark's holosuites would be much better.

Well I just found the name of my new sci-fi technology.

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