Researchers at the University of Sussex have become the first in the world to develop technology which can bend sound waves around an obstacle and levitate an object above it.

SoundBender, developed by Professor Sriram Subramanian, Dr Gianluca Memoli and Dr Diego Martinez Plasencia at the University of Sussex, is an interface capable of producing dynamic self-bending beams that enable both levitation of small objects and tactile feedback around an obstacle.

The technology, presented at the 31st ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium in Berlin on October 15, 2018, overcomes two key limitations of previous ultrasound levitation set-ups, which were unable to create sound fields of similar complexity and could not bypass obstacles that lay between the transducers and the levitating object. (1)

Levitating objects.

Invisible fields.

Every journey ends up to where it has started.

Science keeps on progressing.

And at the end it will succeed in everything.

Recreating what it once discarded as false.

Cosmos used to be magic.

And as Wittgenstein said, science put him to sleep again.

Putting Excalibur back in the stone again.

But at the end…

The next King will come to draw it out once more…

A King who will be a King only because He does not believe in kings…

And will show the whole world.

That anyone could draw the sword out.

Because there was no stone in the first place…