UK team hails bendy ultrasonic levitation breakthrough

The so-called SoundBender technology, presented at the 31st ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium in Berlin, overcomes two key limitations of previous ultrasound levitation devices, which were unable to bypass obstacles that lay between the transducers and the levitating object.

Dr Gianluca 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."

According to the team, the key to its breakthrough was the development of a hybrid system that combines the versatility of phased arrays of transducers (PATs) with the precision of acoustic metamaterials while helping to eliminate the restrictions on sound field resolution and variability each of the previous approaches applied. The metamaterial provides a low modulator pitch to help create sound fields with high spatial resolution while the PAT adds dynamic amplitude and phase control of the field.