Soap bubble screen is 'the world's thinnest display'



The team says the display is the world's thinnest transparent screen

Viewers in the future may be able to watch films on soap bubbles - after researchers developed a technology to project images on a screen made of soap film.

An international team made a display that uses ultrasonic sound waves to alter film's properties and create either a flat or a 3D image.

"It is common knowledge that the surface of soap bubble is a micro membrane. It allows light to pass through and displays the colour on its structure," the lead researcher, Yoichi Ochiai from the University of Tokyo, wrote in his blog.

"We developed an ultra-thin and flexible BRDF [bidirectional reflectance distribution function, a four-dimensional function defining how light is reflected at an opaque surface] screen using the mixture of two colloidal liquids."

The team managed to control and exploit these properties by hitting the bubble's membrane with ultrasonic sound waves, played through speakers.