ZeroN system holds a ball wherever you place it, in mid-air | Hacker News Reader

ZeroN system holds a ball wherever you place it, in mid-air

gizmag.com

54 pointspolymathist17 comments

Oh, they do this with classical electromagnets and computer vision. Lame.

I thought this was going to be a quantum spin locking demo at large distances (>10cm): http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=W...

Facebook was just another PHP/MySQL CRUD web app. Lame.

If the electromagnet can hold the metal ball in mid-air with precision, it can move it around in mid-air in a controlled manner. That can have a lot of applications. Something as simple as raising the phone to my hand when my palm hovers on top of it, or assembly something in mid-air in a controlled manner.

The magnet can only make the target closer to it, and has a fairly short range.

So to lift your phone into your hand, it would have to be positioned over your phone, and within six inches of it.

Found some related projects: http://www.leejinha.com/Beyond This is quite clever. It's a input device that exists halfway between physical and virtual space.

This is the reason this guy works at MIT and not Apple.

Source: http://www.leejinha.com/zeron

Finally! Pong IRL!

Makes me think of Arthur Clarke's laws of prediction.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I particularly like that quote about magic. I'm curious to see if this technology will just be a novelty or wether it will actually lead to the creation of some more sophisticated tactile UIs.

The quote is from Arthur C. Clarke [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

the technology has many potential applications. Using the side-mounted projector, for instance, images can be projected onto the surface of the ZeroN. They will not only stay with it through 3D space, but will also rotate with it as it spins in place. This feature could allow it to be labelled, then used to help visualize physics problems – instead of simply thinking the problems through or looking at two-dimensional computer models, physicists could actually reach in and manipulate models of objects such as electrons by hand

Nice try, but I think we can file this under the heading "solutions looking really hard for problems".

Things I have never, ever heard anyone say: "Man, this problem would be so much easier to visualize if only I had a bunch of metal balls suspended in mid-air".

Don't get me wrong, it would be kinda cool. But the number of people who'd actually find it useful enough to justify whatever the cost might be is probably zero.

A bunch of balls in the air? This thing seems to do one ball in the air. Useful for physicists studying a lone hydrogen ion interacting with a vacuum.

People do build scale models of construction projects all the time. Might be interesting to see a scale model assemble itself in three-space on a large table. Construction is also a big ticket area, so the capital would be available to fund a better simulation of the construction process than what you can do on a screen.

Except this thingy can't do any of those things. You've got a single ball levitating, kept in place by a complicated mechanical system below the deck which adjusts the position of a bunch of other magnets in real time. You might be able to scale it up to a couple of magnets, but not to many magnets.

"Nice try, but I think we can file this under the heading "solutions looking really hard for problems"."

You're thinking of what it can do now instead of what it can become.

I made the same mistake the first time I connected to the web (which was through AOL in 1995) and the first time a few years before the Internet (through Delphi) by way of a slow modem.

Put a laser on it and give me a light sabre and..

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