Researchers use ultrasound to create 3D holograms that can be seen and felt

Imagine a scenario in which a doctor can study a CT scan by actually feeling a disease — literally, putting their hands on a tumor to explore for areas of weakness — or a situation in which an individual can feel the unique shape and contours of an artifact at a museum not by reaching past the red ropes but by touching the hologram image of it a few feet away.  

These scenarios, and more, just might be possible in a few years should the technology discussed in a recent research paper come to fruition. The paper, published in the current issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics, demonstrates a method of producing 3D shapes that can be felt mid-air.

The study was led by Dr. Ben Long and colleagues Professor Sriram Subramanian, Sue Ann Seah, and Tom Carter from the University of Bristol's Department of Computer Science. The technology they developed uses ultrasound and focuses the energy on to the user’s hands above the device for the purpose of feeling invisible shapes. 

The ultrasound waves produced are fairly complex patterns, but the air disturbances they create turn out to be 3D floating shapes. For the purpose of demonstrating their idea, the researchers directed their device at a thin layer of oil so that the depressions in the surface can be seen as spots when lit by a lamp. 

With this demonstration, it’s a bit easier to understand how the system generates a 3D shape invisibly, but can be made visible to the user vis-à-vis 3D display or by matching a picture of a 3D shape to the shape created by the system; either way, the applied imagery creates something that can be seen and felt. 

Dr. Ben Long, Research Assistant from the Bristol Interaction and Graphics (BIG) group in the Department of Computer Science, said: “Touchable holograms, immersive virtual reality that you can feel and complex touchable controls in free space, are all possible ways of using this system. 

“In the future, people could feel holograms of objects that would not otherwise be touchable, such as feeling the differences between materials in a CT scan or understanding the shapes of artifacts in a museum.” 

The group’s work will be presented at the SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 conference. You can learn more about the technology by checking out the video below.

University of Bristol