By Clay Dillow Posted 07.02.2012 at 12:03 pm 7 Comments

Colloid Display A sonically controlled soap bubble could be the world's thinnest transparent display. via Yoichi Ochiai

The world’s thinnest transparent screen isn’t really a screen at all, but something more like a soap bubble. An international team of researchers claims its display--which uses ultrasonic sound waves to change the properties of a soap-like film to display both flat and 3-D images--is the world’s thinnest transparent screen, and that using several of them together can even produce a holographic projection.

The bubble itself is made of a mixture that’s more difficult to burst than your average dish soap bubble, though soap is a key ingredient. Augmented with colloids, objects can even pierce or pass through the bubble without destroying it. This membrane-like bubble display can be controlled using ultrasonic vibrations that vary its opacity and reflectance, altering the light projected onto the screen.

More than one of these membrane displays used in tandem can produce even more nuanced imagery, including 3-D effects and holographic projections. All this is explained in far more visual detail in the video below.

[BBC]

7 Comments

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Adriannxt
07/02/12 at 1:00 pm

That is a neat idea, to use ultrasound to change The transparency. I'm not to sure of the real world applications of this though.

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JediMindset
07/02/12 at 1:20 pm

this is reality. we live in a simulated bubble constructed by a race in the not so distant future. we are their experiment and yet we are unaware of this.

"You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes." -Morpheus

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Robot
07/02/12 at 3:18 pm

JediMindset,
Sir, I suggest you stop snorting the bubbles in your bubble bath sir, take care.;)

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ford2go
07/03/12 at 2:05 am

This is some pretty cool original thinking. Seems to have a lot of possibilities, but the devil is always in the details.

Hope that it grows up to become something.

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Robot
07/03/12 at 11:29 am

JediMindset,
Why is taking the blue pill an ending. Perhaps it a limitation to a current direction of perseption. But like all walls in life, we humans tend to go through them, around them, under them or about them. We may even create a warm in time and space and just pass to another place.

And why is taking the red pill only lead down a deep whole. Perhaps in the great perspective of things and the cosmos, down is up and so in enter Wonderland, we are in fact going up and leaving Wonderland and vernturing to a new world all together.

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emneumann
07/07/12 at 12:47 am

This article and accompanying video seem to go out of their way to ignore the fact that these images are still projected onto the screen using standard projection tecniques and perhaps even imply that the images themselves are created by the sound waves. The only cool thing here is transparency control of a thin film. I'm just saying this thing seems a bit overblown and not particularly interesting.

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techgeekpi
01/03/13 at 11:25 am

this could really give me a reason to carry bubbles to class or to sports practice



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