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

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[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.

[metroidfan88]

i'm working in a laboratory, but i have never seen tetris playing erythrocytes under a microscope yet^^

[darkarch757]

This is how I was born

[mindnomad]

This is incredible

[Jonnaphril Lastima]

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?

[Eric Chappell]

That's awesome

[jmameren]

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