British Engineers Create Sonic Tractor Beam (bbc.co.uk)

An anonymous reader writes: According to the BBC, engineers in Bristol, England have created a system for remote manipulation of physical objects using sound holograms. The video shows pea-sized objects being dragged around and stacked up in mid-air with no visible means of support. "In essence, an object sitting in a 'quiet' region of space can be held there if it is surrounded by very high-intensity sound waves. As the pattern of that boundary shifts, the object can be moved around." If the Empire is making a tractor beam, now they only need a Death Star to go with it.

Comments

Re:Not a tractor beam

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a pressor beam. It doesn't attract anything.

Not true.

"We wanted to demonstrate that we could do it upside down. We had a discussion and we thought that everyone thinks of a tractor beam as people being sucked up into space.

"So we mounted the array upside-down in a cardboard UFO, and the particle gets sucked up into it."

And this is demonstrated in the video attached to the article too.,