8 days ago
There’s also the classic magnetic levitation of bugs:
https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article-pdf/51/9/36/831336...
The author is as far as I know the only physicist to receive both a Nobel prize (for graphene) and an Ignoble prize (for levitating small animals), and he has commented that he’s equally proud of both.
(He’s also published a non-popsci physics paper about the experiment for those interested, and there are YouTube videos of the experiment.)
9 days ago
Cool, I imagine you also could use multiple cameras to make photogrammetric 3D scans of tiny particles and such. You don't have control over the orientation, but that doesn't matter if you can take the pictures fast enough while it is tumbling around.
8 days ago
Some acoustic levitation devices can provide stabilizing torque
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35130156/
That Olympus camera they use is legendary for "focus stacking". I get frustrated taking pictures of flowers because even with a macro lens or very long lens you can't get all the parts of a flower in perfect "tack sharp" focus. Most people would say my flower pics are lovely
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114117492055570941
but if you look close you can see the closest and furthest parts of that day little aren't quite in focus. I shoot landscapes with the aperture at f/24, crank the ISO high, and remove the noise with DxO, but you can't get perfect flower photos that way.
It drives me nuts when I see other people's pictures that are better, but they get better photos by taking multiple images at different focuses and compositing them, see
https://learnandsupport.getolympus.com/om-system-ambassadors...
I should be able to do that with my Sony α7iv with the remote control I have but it's tricky and the Olympus system makes it a lot easier, Sony makes an α7R camera that has built in focus stacking but it has a sensor with way too many pixels for the sports photography I do where I went to a race last weekend and took 2400 photos and expect to publish one of almost all the 700 finishers. Here's the last event I did
7 days ago
Your flower pics would be an interesting application for advanced liquid lenses; something where the lens shape could be distorted to keep all of the subject in perfect focus.
7 days ago
You can actually have control of orientation, see this paper out of the Medical University of Innsbruck! They do this on a zebra fish embryo :)
7 days ago
Cool! I hoped there would be a video showing the "levitation device" in action, but alas, the only video in the article was an ad...
7 days ago
Here's some footage from one company that utilises this technology (a spin-off out of my lab at UCL)
7 days ago
"A Comprehensive Review of Acoustic Levitation Techniques and Applications" (2025), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/390161963_A_Compreh...
DIY "TinyLev: A multi-emitter single-axis acoustic levitator" (2017), https://brucedrinkwater.com/portfolio/tinylev-a-multi-emitte...
7 days ago
If anyone has any questions on this, my PhD is on in-air ultrasonic acoustic levitation (and other uses of in-air focused ultrasound) :)
8 days ago
7 days ago
Tractor beam!