LOS ANGELES — I remember seeing them all the time in kitsch stores. Levitating balls, like baseballs or globes, are apparently a popular gift. And it’s understandable why: the strange sight of a ball floating in the air is an instant conversation piece. But the balls are inevitably fragile: tap them just a bit, and they pop out of their electromagnetic balance. They seemed destined to float in place, little more impressive than a granite fountain ball that spins and rotates on water.
A new technology demo’d by MIT researcher Jinha Lee points to what might one day be a cooler use of that technology. In this crazy video, Lee shows how a ball, levitated in space, can be manipulated with your hand. The system remembers your movements and actually recreates them precisely.
The ball floats in space between two spaces. (image via leejinha.com)
While the technology is clearly an impressive feat of engineering and computing, Lee writes that his motivations come from more humanist origins:
I think there is something fundamental behind motivations to liberate physical matter from gravity and enable control. The motivation has existed as a shared dream amongst humans for millennia. It is an idea found in mythologies, desired by alchemists and visualized in Science Fiction movies. I have aspired to create a space where we can experience a glimpse of this future.
An illustration of how the ZeroN works.
Indeed, the idea of floating something in space pops up time and time again in creative culture. I wrote about one recently: the ephemeral cloud floating in place in a Dutch gallery. It’s not hard to imagine the creative applications here, from an interactive art installation that follows visitors’ movements, to a performance piece consisting of people floating in space (would they have to be encased in a magnetic ball?). I can also see applications here for remote interactions, the same way one artist visualized waves.
For now, at least we can this video. Lee has his own poetic suggestion for the technology:
Physical motions of people can be collected in this medium to preserve and play them back indefinitely. When the users move and release the ZeroN, it continues to float and starts to move along the same path. This allows a unique, tangible record of a user’s physical presence and motion which will continue to exist even after the death of the person.
