real-life Tetris under a microscope

A real-life implementation of the evergreen arcade game Tetris was obtained by optically trapping 42 glass microspheres (1 μm or 0.001 mm diameter) in a 25 μm x 20 μm sized area under a microscope. Their positions are then steered with a computer.

More info can be found on http://www.nat.vu.nl/~joost/tetris

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• optical
• tweezers
• AOD
• laser
• trapping
• tetris
• microtetris
• microscope

[ey8bb]

Are you using more than one laser here, or are the spheres manipulated through "time-sharing" of a single laser? In any case, very impressive!

[jmameren]

We did it through timesharing of a single laser.

[threelegduck]

wow. how much do they weigh and how much energy must the laser produce? (can you do this with a protosoa to make a micro-scaled pac-man?)

[jmameren]

These glass beads are pretty light-weight: 1 pg (picogram or 10^(-12) gram...

However, you could in principle do the same trick with bacteria, to get somewhat closer to live pac-man! :-)

[JustynSucks]

Whoever was playing isn't very good at tetris. xD

I'm just kidding.

Cool video.

Could use some background music though.

[jmameren]

@UALGProduction Hehe, Tetris microscopes are not out yet -- it was a self-built microscope we used.

[mindnomad]

This is incredible

[animaticToshiue]

THIS IS SOOOOO COOL!!!!! :) :)

[squigy97]

Oooooooooh, so THAT'S how babies are formed... XD

[printz150]

Holy cow this is amazing

[AlexGRFan97]

Holy shit they're so small they're naturally unstable.

[BasslineFishehhh]

are you messing with sperm?

[gobigggen]

That's awesome

[boobunny100]

@evanesp23 they were just demonstrating the effectiveness of the tool... try looking up "laser tweezers" or "optical trap"... it is very cool, quite simple, conceptually..... and has been very useful and will continue to be very useful

[Serperoth]

This is pure AWESOMENESS.