A volumetric display for visual, tactile and audio presentation using acoustic trapping

Authors: Ryuji Hirayama, Diego Martinez Plasencia, Nobuyuki Masuda & Sriram Subramanian Science-fiction movies such as Star Wars portray volumetric systems that not only provide visual but also tactile and audible 3D content. Here, we present a Multimodal Acoustic Trap Display (MATD): a mid-air volumetric display that can simultaneously deliver visual, auditory, and tactile content, using acoustophoresis as the single operating principle. Our system acoustically traps a particle and illuminates it with red, green, and blue light to control its colour as it quickly scans through our display volume. Using time multiplexing with a secondary trap, amplitude modulation and phase minimization, the MATD delivers simultaneous auditive and tactile content. The full paper is available at We acknowledge funding from the EPSRC project EP/N014197/1 ‘User interaction with self-supporting free-form physical objects’, the EU FET-Open project Levitate (grant agreement number 737087), the Royal Academy of Engineering Chairs in Emerging Technology Scheme (CiET1718/14), the Rutherford fellowship scheme, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science through Grant-in-Aid number 18J01002 and the Kenjiro Takayanagi Foundation.