The June 2020 issue of Physics World features a nice article on acoustic displays. It’s entitled “Making images with sound” and is written by Michael Allen, a science journalist based in Bristol, UK. Physics World is published by the Institute of Physics for a general readership and for the moment, the article is freely available. In particular it discusses the paper by Fushimi et al, (2019) recently published in Applied Physics Letters. It includes an interview between Michael Allen and some of the authors of this paper (Tatsiki Fushimi, Tom Hill and I).
In this paper, we use a phased array to create a movable acoustic trap. The trap is rapidly scanned in space, thereby moving the particle. If the particle is moved fast enough, then due to the persistence of vision effect, a 3D shape can be rendered. We show the first tantalising examples of this possibility. These displays are as close as anyone has yet got to a volumetric display in which an unobstructed 3D shape is rendered. We published the first paper on this acoustophoretic display concept, followed shortly after by the paper by Hirayama et al, (2019) which also included sound and haptics. Just after this Physics World article went live we published a new paper which explores the limits of how large a acoustophoretic display can be made (see Fushimi et al, 2020).
Bruce Drinkwater 