Researchers from the United Kingdom have developed a technology that allows you to create realistic holograms.





holograms that you can "feel"





Scientists have introduced a device that creates holograms using ultrasound and a polystyrene ball. They can be seen with the naked eye, heard and even felt without visual reality systems.





Tangible hologram in the shape of a butterfly

Holograms are one of those inventions that people around the world are waiting for. In science fiction, they are no longer new, but real science is just beginning to move forward in this area.





Earlier, holograms based on acoustic or magnetic levitation were created. Thanks to fine control, they could create three-dimensional figures and smoothly move them.





True, such technologies had at least two problems: low “resolution” - the number of particles per unit volume - and the bulkiness of holographic devices. In addition, most of them do not allow you to feel direct contact with the image, since the distribution of particles is violated.





However, in 2015, Japanese scientists already introduced a technology that made it possible to make a three-dimensional image tangible. To do this, they used ultrafast femtosecond lasers.





To the touch, such a hologram turned out to be like sandpaper. Another similar technology uses ultrasound to simulate touching an object and can even adjust the “hardness” of the object, increasing the sound pressure.





Tangible hologram technology

new technology proposed by British researchers is called MATD, a multimodal acoustic trap for imaging. According to the developers, it "can simultaneously deliver visual, auditory and tactile information."





At the heart of this technology is a phenomenon called “acoustophoresis”: in this case, sound waves move and manipulate an object - in this case, a lot of particles - to form an image in a small container containing a large number of very small speakers.





The new development catches a small particle from a special lightweight material with a sound wave and can hold it in the desired position, as well as illuminate it with different colors.





To convey the sensations, scientists used previously developed ultrasound technology. By modifying it, the researchers achieved the ability to more finely recreate the structure of objects and combine it with the movements of the hologram.