Japanese scientists have created what may be the world’s smallest video game. Using a regular controller, players can control a tiny digital ship, firing nanoscale bullets to push around a physical polystyrene ball just a few microns wide.
Augmented reality (AR) is that kind of tech where virtual objects and characters are overlaid onto the real world. The most famous example would be Pokémon Go, and Apple even put a massive bet on it in 2023 with the Vision Pro headset.
This new game, created by scientists at Nagoya University in Japan, could arguably be called AR. The spaceship and the bullets it fires are virtual, overlaid on this microscopic scene – but the targets are real-world balls of polystyrene. It’s kind of like if the Pikachu you were trying to catch could physically rustle the bushes in your yard.
The way it works is pretty clever. The player’s controller actually moves an electron beam beneath the play area – a silicon-nitrogen substrate. This creates the triangular pattern that represents the ship, which looks like the one from arcade classic Asteroids. As the player steers their ship with the controller, the electron beam moves around to keep up the illusion. The “bullets” fired by the ship work in a similar way, as nano-scale dot patterns generated when the player presses another button.
So how do these virtual objects move physical balls? The electron beams produce dynamic patterns of electric fields which push the balls around through electrostatic interactions. The end result can be seen below – but be warned, it’s probably not quite as exciting as you imagined.
Okay, so these nanoscale games aren’t going to be the next Nintendo-killer, but that’s not really the goal. The team was more looking for an engaging way to show off their new technology for moving tiny objects without physically touching them. It could be used to assemble biomolecules or nanomachines, or even potentially guiding drugs to viruses and bacteria inside living organisms.
The research was published in the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics.
Source: Nagoya University via Phys.org