A whole new way of looking at ultrasound: You can touch it, Ep. 185

Hey, guys. My name is Stephen Beacham and here's what's happening this week on CNET's Crave. [MUSIC] The Light Bandit sucks natural light into your home and allows you to redistribute it using a long. Straw-like fiber optic tube. You simply place this square box shaped device into your window, and voila. You have a light tube that will pour natural light into any space of your house for free. The box, according to inventor Duncan Earl, contains nearly 100 tiny mirrors. That rotate very slowly to reflect the sunlight toward a focusing mirror, which concentrates the sunlight into the optical fiber. The Light Bandit is currently raising funds on KickStarter, and if you act now, they'll throw in a handheld Light Bandit device for showing off to your friends and a Light Bandit light sabre. Sound effects not included. The Mars levitating speaker features the UFO style disk that floats above a sleek black sub woofer column. And that's not all. The Mars bluetooth speaker made by the company Crazybaby, which they probably are, is a two part speaker. The cylindrical base acts as the sub frequency for music, and the. Exploding UFO looking thingy is also a speaker pumping out the high and mid-range frequencies. The floating part, otherwise known as the Mars Craft, uses magnetic technology developed by Levitation Arts to float. You can take the Mars Craft with you, making your jams portable, and the entire unit will raise its volume or lower it based on how far away you are. The sound cones out of all sides of the speaker. Filling your area with tunes, and it includes two USB ports for charging your devices, maybe while your on a conference call using the Mars speaker. Right now you can preorder your Mars speaker for $149 at crazybaby.com. A team of researchers at the University of Bristol and the Department of Computer Science are using ultrasound technology to create a three dimensional shape in mid air that could be touched and seen by a user. Ultrasound produces an effect known as acoustic radiation. Force. Which the researchers found could be focused into complex patterns in such a ways to cause an air disturbance. Using this property of ultrasound, the researchers were able to create 3D haptic shapes in mid air so that users can feel those air disturbances on the skin. Moreover, those patterns can then be formed into different 3D shapes. According to a paper published by the research group in the Journal ACM Transactions on Graphics. This approach applies to the principles of acoustic radiation force. Whereby the non-linear effects of sound produce forces on the skin which are strong enough to generate tactile sensations. The user perceives a discernible haptic shape when the corresponding acoustic interference pattern is generated above a precisely controlled two-dimensional phased array of ultrasound transducers. I don't know, does this look real? I don't know. Leave, leave a comment, tell me if you think it's real. All right guys, that's your show. Thank you very much for watching. As always, you can find all these news stories on CNET's craveblog at www.crave.cnet.com. Make sure you pull up crave on twitter @crave. And make sure to vote in this weeks crave poll. What is your reaction to the new Star Wars trailer? Go to the blog and enter your vote. [FOREIGN] [FOREIGN] [FOREIGN] [FOREIGN] [FOREIGN] [NOISE] [FOREIGN] [MUSIC] [FOREIGN]