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IBM Makes a Movie Out of Atoms
harrymcc writes "IBM's Almaden Research Center has a scanning tunneling microscope, a device invented by the company. It uses it to move individual atoms around — mostly for storage research. But it's created a 242-frame cartoon, A Boy and His Atom, using individual atoms as pixels. Guinness has certified it as the world's smallest movie."
242 frames, and ten 18-hour days of work by multiple people using a very tiny copper needle attached to an expensive machine to move the atoms around.
What a waste of time.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Isn't every movie made out of atoms?
A sodium atom and a potassium atom are walking down the street when suddenly the sodium atom stops with a concerned look. "I just lost an electron" he said. "Are you sure?" asked the potassium atom. The sodium atom replied with, "Yeah, I'm positive."
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
"Atomation"
I can't wait for the sequel.
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/40970.wss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0&list=PLaFe0BJiho2pbiULC7W4UpxFGArH7oD7i&index=1
The making of the world's smallest movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0&list=PLaFe0BJiho2pbiULC7W4UpxFGArH7oD7i"
By Larry Greenemeier, Scientific Amererican:
What is the “final frontier”? Star Trek fans will tell you it’s space. Filmmaker/aquanaut James Cameron will tell you it’s the ocean’s depths. IBM, however, is thinking much smaller.
The company’s research division on Wednesday released a stop-motion movie whose main character is a stick figure only a few atoms in size. “A Boy and His Atom” is the story, not surprisingly, of a character named Atom who befriends a single atom and proceeds to play with his new friend by dancing, playing catch and bouncing on a trampoline. It may not be an Oscar-winning script, but the performance does mark a breakthrough in scientists’ ability to capture, position and shape individual atoms with precision using temperature, pressure and vibrations.
“Think of this as Claymation—you shape your Wallace and Gromit, put them in your scene and take a picture of it,” says Andreas Heinrich, principle investigator at IBM Research. “Then you change the position of the characters and take another picture.” Heinrich and his team arranged and rearranged atoms to create 242 distinct frames later stitched together to make their movie, which Guinness World Records has certified as the tiniest stop-motion film ever made.
IBM researchers relied on a bit of movie magic to bring Atom to life (see video below). Each of the dots used to make the character is actually a molecule of carbon monoxide resting on a copper surface, framed so that the audience can see only the oxygen atoms (the carbon atoms are off screen). The researchers used a two-ton scanning tunneling microscope to magnify the atoms’ surfaces more than 100 million times. The microscope features an extremely sharp needle that the researchers used to move the molecules to specific locations.
This ability to manipulate individual atoms has big implications for the future of computing and communications. Engineers have managed to shrink certain components within today’s magnetic disk drives down to a few dozen nanometers. “We’re interested in exploring data movement and storage at the atomic scale,” the stuff of quantum computing, Heinrich says. Whereas a classic computer uses bits—a zero or a one—to store information, a quantum computer lets you—in principle at least—have a zero and a one at the same time in a quantum bit (or a qubit).” If you can do both of these at the same time, you can calculate answers faster than any computer using classic bits,” he says, adding that his lab’s mission is to determine whether atoms can someday be harnessed for computation and data storage.
In a tie-in with the upcoming film "Star Trek into Darkness," IBM Research created this nanometer-sized image of the Enterprise. Courtesy of IBM Research.
IBM researchers decided to make their movie last year after publishing the results of years of atomic storage experiments, Heinrich says. “The general public should know about this kind of work and be interested in it,” he adds. “The best way to do that is to make a movie that is told in the language of science although doesn’t necessarily tell a scientific story. It tells a human story of a boy dancing with his friend.”
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2013/05/01/ibm-movie-does-claymation-at-the-atomic-scale-video/
The sequel is being made out of quantum entangled atoms. So, if you and your friend go to see it, one will think it is horrible and the other it is great no-matter how far apart your seats are.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
"Atomation 2: Quantum Boogaloo"?
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
The problem with the movie is the more you know about its plot, the less sure you are sure about its characters and the more you know about the characters the less you know about what is actually occurring.
Tragically, because the credits at the end tell you who the characters are, after seeing the movie you won't be able to know anything about what happened in it.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
How does that translate into DPI???
According to this report, the movie depicts an area of 45 x 25 nanometers. I use the body of the stickman to approximate pixels, which gives me about 30 pixels in height. Which translates to 3 * 10^7 DPI. Which will be in your iPhone 71's über-retina display (assuming dpi grows exponentially). Although it's really debatable if your eye is capable of making use of such a high resolution.
A big bang, if you will.
Thanks for doing the math. I had it all written out and was starting to work on it, and I actually had to go *do my job.* Do they not realize what important work we do here in Slashdot discussions?
Past a certain point, super-high resolution could get quite interesting: once your "pixel" structures get smaller than visible light wavelengths, you can use them to form interference patterns to not only control the brightness, but also the wavefront shape of transmitted light --- A.K.A. holograms. Then you get a "true" 3D display, which recreates the proper relation between binocular depth perception and how far out each eye is focused.
I believe those are actually a visualization of the atoms' electrons moving across the copper surface... you can see constructive and destructive destruction of the waves around the boy. If you look at this stm image ( http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-flinte/stm16.jpg ), the bottom right image shows the wave function of electrons completely trapped inside the circle of atoms.
Remember, this is scanning tunneling microscopy, so the electrons are not actually going in and out of the plane... what we're seeing is their potential to tunnel into the tip of the microscope.
But how would you handle addressing all those pixels? You'd also need either a supercomputer-in-a-box to render the image, or a storage medium with the speed and capacity to playback a prerecorded hologram.
Assuming you want motion, that is. If you can just print fixed pixels small enough, you can print holograms. This approach limits you still to monochromatic images - you need changeable pixels if you want to do the R-G-B interleave to simulate color images.
Yes, there are many other engineering/technology hurdles to cross to usefully generate dynamic holograms. However, I don't think there's anything particularly impassable in this case.
With such display technology, I doubt you'd think in terms of addressing/storing individual "pixels" in one "centralized" place; instead, you might have hardware DSPs behind "macropixels" ("normal pixel"-sized arrays of the light-wavelength-scale micropixels) which would receive 3D models and calculate the transform into the interference pattern for the "macropixel." A "supercomputer-in-a-box," indeed, but for a highly parallelizable task. You'd never store the (highly redundant) "pixel representation" of a hologram, but rather the 3D model that produces it, and re-create the "pixels" on the fly in hardware as needed. By interleaving colored "macropixels" (just like interleaved colored pixels on regular displays) you could produce "full color" holograms.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/1/ibm-movie-atoms
Welcome to science. You are experimenting on a new method of doing something, you got some success, however you need more testing, you might as well have some fun while doing it. Drawing a series of pictures are just about as productive as drawing grids or some other pattern. Besides that after effect is a cute little movie to explain the technology they are doing.
We need more support for these type of things, and less of the bean counter mentality who assumes just because the research isn't obviously monetizable that it is useless.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Trying to interleve colored pixels would lead to horrible interference problems degrading image quality. I was thinking of temporal interleave, like how a DLP projector does it. You'd need to be able to generate and display holograms at 75fps though. The hypothetical 'holoprojector' surface basically is just a DLP chip, but crazily more precise and many times larger.
Spatially interleaving color pixels would produce issues similar to viewing the world through a window screen --- yes, there are diffraction artifacts, but it's not a completely horrible unrecognizable view. Furthermore, you could move to non-periodic tilings for the colors which would eliminate obvious diffraction spikes. Temporal interleaving would indeed work too (and better in some aspects); we'll have to get a lot closer to production-ready technology than we currently are to assess what particular approach will work.
...than Twilight. And that copper atom blows Kristen Stewart away as an actress.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Atom jokes are fine, but the parent is the first interesting or informative comment on the whole thread.
The "making of" linked at the end of the movie is well made and stimulating. I particularly liked this comment from the director of the project:
"If I can do this and I can get a thousand kids join science, rather than go to law school, I would be super happy".
I can see it now: coming soon to a cinema near you "A Real Quantum of Solace" and "Ion Man"