Researchers develop microchip that displays image sequences.

There is a lot of science fiction involved. The fact that boys like to read these books as children could be a stereotype against the backdrop of gentrification. But I also watched Captain Future and co. and would give anything to be able to enjoy them again like a child. What was true 30 to 40 years ago is obviously true for every generation. And it must be clear that these book worlds form images in the human brain that at some point expand into what they are, science that simply becomes real.

Stuttgart, September 15h, 2020 Let’s try to imagine for a moment that these images in our head will develop over the years into a complete idea, perhaps like a kind of vision, then we now have the imagination for what the following may mean.

A chip, a microchip, is able to create a hologram of itself directly from its surface through its incorporated technology, if we may describe it that way. Let’s quickly go back to Star Trek or Starship Enterprise and think back to ‘Scotty, beam me up’. Then we might understand what is meant.

Anyone who knows how films are created, i.e. by a rapid succession of image sequences running several times in succession, will now understand the principle. Individual holographic images form a holographic film. This is exactly what researchers from the Max Planck Institute, the University of Stuttgart and the Institute of Microelectronics Stuttgart have now succeeded in doing. They have developed an ultrasound projector based on a microchip that generates holographic image sequences.

A microchip is usually just 20 or 30 mm in size. The chip itself contains tiny switches which form the basis of the computing processes in the chip, or crystal, as they say. Directly above this, 10,000 electrodes are placed in a matrix form on this small surface. From here, the images are generated by creating bubbles. More detailed descriptions can be found in the source in the appendix.

Captain Future is now a reality and I will endeavour to keep my memory clean in the future. Because who knows what’s still to come. Oh yes, maybe there are no aliens at all, but they will only come into being by virtue of our imagination, in which people like the Tesla founder create the possibilities to colonise other worlds.

Original publication:

“Spatial ultrasound modulation by digitally controlling microbubble arrays”, Zhichao Ma, Kai Melde, Athanasios G. Athanassiadis, Michael Schau, Harald Richter, Tian Qiu and Peer Fischer, Nature Communications, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18347-2

PictureSource: Holograpy, Image by GraphicsSC from Pixabay

IMS Chips, Detail des Multielektroden-Chips