Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by iliis 3069 days ago
Awesome achievement! This really looks like a viable way of true floating 3D-images.

Can you levitate multiple particles at the same time? How fast are they moving? How sensitivie is it to disturbances in the air?

2 comments

> Can you levitate multiple particles at the same time?

Yes, but their device currently is only capable of levitating a single particle. With the current approach, the device would need one laser for confining each particle. The lasers used for RGB could potentially be multiplexed between particles, but this is less likely to work for the confinement due to the instability of the trap.

> How fast are they moving?

Pretty slow. All the "big" images (Leia, grad student, etc) are long-exposure. You can see the particle moving in real-time at about 0:50. In the videos, you can see the device can almost do real-time persistence of vision for volumes substantially smaller than a fingertip.

> How sensitive is it to disturbances in the air?

As I mentioned above, the confinement is weak and the trap is pretty unstable. Its possible that they have improved the longevity of the trap in the last few months, but when doing long-exposure the device is surrounded by a heavy cloth barrier to block both external light and air movement.

I'm guessing it's very sensitive to air flow since the photon "shells" are literally trapping the particles.