Experiments with hard light 

Fun fact, light does push, or to be precise, applies radiation pressure onto reflective surfaces. Such a phenomenon would be really hard to notice with the lasers which he has access to, and even if he had stronger ones the caps would incinerate before noticing it. But this kind of technology works well in space for small payload missions. Solar sails have already been tested successfully and there are projects to push probes with lasers.

It was immediately apparent that it wasn't the light, but a super convincing effect, I wish I could make something like that for my kids, they would go bananas 😂

I was not expecting a 3D environment modelled in a game engine to drive this, thought it would involve a hidden light sensor or something. Complex but very well done

I had expected some sort of hidden air blast. Nice job.

You should look into setting up the slicing software to only use PVA for the support interface layers, it saves a lot of the expensive PVA filament when most of the support structure is printed with normal plastic and then switching to PVA for just the attachment points to the model

1:40 You are correct that Photons do not have mass. However because of physics buggery they do have a measurable momentum and can apply force to things

Photons don''t have mass but they do have momentum, so they DO push stuff around, ever so slightly.

I was expecting a vortex cannon, but this is just so much more deliciously Rube Goldberg-esque.

As a Unity developer this is the cleverest application of Unity and VR I have seen. Operating physical things from within a game is pretty neat.

This is actually way more clever than I expected! Really cool, well done.

Lasers do produce a force on objects, it’s true that photons have no mass but this is an incomplete understanding, photons do have a small amount of momentum and momentum can be transferred. The force is small but lasers do indeed transmit a force on objects they strike that is measurable with fairly basic equipment. You can test this with some styrofoam in some water and a moderately powered laser.

This would be killer tech for an escape room or other immersive experience. Amazing work.

You CAN actually apply force with a laser though... In physics, momentum is defined as the product of mass and velocity of an object. According to the law of conservation of momentum, any change in momentum must be accompanied by an equal and opposite change in momentum elsewhere in the system. Light, although massless, carries momentum. When light is absorbed or reflected, it can transfer some of this momentum to the object it interacts with, thus exerting a force on it. This principle is the basis for optical trapping methods like "optical tweezers," which can trap and manipulate microscopic particles using laser beams. It's also the principle behind solar sails, where light from the Sun is used to propel a spacecraft by transferring momentum to its reflective sail.

Exciting twist. And I would love to see more of this kind of VR/real world action

I could see a more compact version of this being really useful for live stage shows or haunted houses, allowing the actors to cue their own effects at a distance, and in any order, rather than having to sync timing with the back of house.

I was legitimately ready to learn how you were going to push with light. Then i became certain you were shooting air bursts, then the explanation came, and dang really good job James. Great sponsor video i'll have to try out the game.

You can push objects with a laser-up to nearly the speed of light in fact, however it is a miniscule amount of force and negligible in an environment with much of any friction. Not to mention moving a cup in earths air and friction with ground would require a laser powerful enough that it would both melt the laser, cup, and ionize the air in such a manner that it would explode around you.

I was going to write that this is completely overengineered, but actually its exactly right engineered. Very cool R -> VR -> R bridge system. You could probably sell that.

Next time you do solluble support, just make the interface layers solluble and you save a lot of that expensive PVa filament.

You CAN actually apply force with a laser though...

This is the most interesting ad I have ever seen, great work! Even with some VR, that was not expected but excellently performed

Modbot did a video using petg supports for PLA, came off super clean. No soaking necessary.

I have to admit, this is a very good take at an advertorial, great work!

I saw the middle one was jumping up but i thought you'd done something where you were detecting the intensity of light passing through the cup and had set a threshold such that it went off only when the laser light was on it, perhaps even just looking for the particular wavelength of the laser. The VR stuff was an interesting take.

Okay, that you got such an organic looking shape in CAD is...well done.

Finally, someone who can make me the Aperture Science Hard Light Bridge of my dreams!

The VR control is very interesting. Imagine the system tracking your hand movement and gestures, to let you point at appliances/lights to turn them on

Easily one of the coolest videos I ever watched

Photons have energy and energy has an equality to mass

Nice title. I got to learn about the science of hard light and I'm glad that I wasn't tricked into watching a video about a magic trick.

Indeed, Light has no Mass but... It does have Momentum and will exert a radiation pressure force. A consequence of relativity which can be described as: P = E/c, where E is the energy of the photon. 😎

Photons have no mass, but they have *momentum* , so they *can* apply force. That's how light sail works. But the momentum of photon is so low, that even with high intensity near UV light the momentum change (and thus force) is very, very small.

The very best thing to see right when I open youtube!

reminder photons don't have mass they do have momentum they can and do apply force, just very little. In space, however, its enough to divert an objects course over time, and lights on space craft give off a small amount of thrust.

Phenomenal use of tech and imagination!

You can use ARCore and an Android Smartphone (or ARKit with an iPhone, both have Unity plugins) and film both the real and virtual world. Just get a virtual camera attached to the position of the Smartphone (which you can sync to the virtual coordinate system through Augmented Images or QRCodes) and voilà, you can grab the camera image from the phone and the virtual image from the virtual camera and have both worlds if their positions remain in sync. Do whatever you need with that information ;) I had a research project around synchronization of coordinate spaces between AR/VR devices, happy to supply the paper (although I'd probably have to translate it).

Your mixed reality projects were pretty neat

Nice touch on the magician-esc addition to the project

Super cool application of magic/misdirection.

That was a wild way to so the magic! Very cool!

Excellent invention and design by James. Lousy name by EA calling a vambrace/gauntlet (something that goes on the arm) a sigil, (something that is drawn on inscribed.) It's like calling the basket on a sword calligraphy.

I kind of just assumed he was shooting rubberbands from his fingers and using the lasers to aim haha. This whole setup is a very Bruton arrangement

If you look at solar sails and optical tweezers you will see that photons can push things and exert forces, same with the photoelectric effect when photons knock electrons out of a material. Photons have no mass but they do have momentum and do exert force when colliding with objects, the force is just very small.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - Arthur C. Clarke.

Clever trickery there!

It was funny to hear you say you don’t make cosplay props when earlier in your RU-vid career you made cosplay outfits. That Hulkbuster suit was epic. I must admit though you’ve come a really long way since then. But that cosplay stuff was great. It was how I was introduced to your channel.

That is actually so creative

Great video, James...👍

Neat!, I thought you did it with one of those shockwave/air blow toys.

That was cool man.

The reveal of the trick was excellent. Next stop force push!

"Photons of light have no mass" - James Bruton, 2023

I Love this!! Before I started working on my Fan Film story, it Began as a humble Shooting Gallery, where I would set it up at a Convention and have Guests pay a few bucks for Charity, through the 501st Legion, to shoot Nerf darts at a collection of Stormtrooper action figures at 3.75 inch, 6 inch and 12 inch figures on a collapsible Imperial Base diorama. This was a few years ago now and at one point I thought of a Laser Tag version of the Shooting Gallery with the same kind of set up as used here in this video. That way there could be a Points Value per target assigned and other record gags, even Rankings could be set up, all for fun as a "Stormtrooper Enlistment Test" gag. Themed prizes out of small prizes, like keychain fobs, pens, stickers, anything "giveaway merch", that sort of thing. But I have Neither the equipment, knowledge or skills, well as yet, to make use of this idea and yet...I'm saving this to my fan film Resources playlist as the Solenoid triggers have Several Practical Applications I can make use of, Plausibly, in my fan film. For instance, one of my protagonists is running from enemy blaster fire along a wall with Blaster bolts hitting the wall trailing just behind them...like you would see for a machine gun, with bullet holes spraying debris from each bullet. I wanna pull off a similar shot along a stretch of Drywall/Sheetrock, with the blaster bolt holes already cut out, line up a tube in each hole, fill with some dust and chunks, Solenoid triggers each in quick succession and Voila, blaster damage on the run. That'd be cool, but time consuming to set up just for that when Hose and a bunch of Small fireplace Bellows and people for the same gag is the operational plan at the moment. But...to Revisit and pay homage to the birth of my fan series, I'm gonna use the action figure gag for the larger battle scenes in the latter episodes.

I thought the wrist thing was a decent project, but seems like the magic was the real project 😅 very cool end look 👌🏼

So it's 'Tin Can Alley' meets 'Immortals of Aveum', cool!

3:55 "Now I really don't make cosplay props . . " says the man who built Iron Man, a Transformer and Elmo.

Soon as I saw "hard light" I reminisced to Portal 2's hard light bridges. This modern game seems too intense and typical to me because I'm an old git!

A 16th century peasant would scream seeing every single component of this video

This is dope

No wait, you mean all those space movies lied to us? Cool, project big J.

This is actually a really cool sponsored vid.

I designed a cooling duct for the Taz Pro which eliminates the risk of spaghetti evolving into a solid blob which encases the extruder

Brilliant. Can this be used for Roko's basilisk?

I actually felt disappointed there! I thought there was going to be some real indepth science about crossing lazer beams and heating pockets of air and .... Nope! Still - good project.

1:35 - Radiation pressure has left the chatroom

So this is all a EA plug and there is no kinetic laser... Well i mean obviously there isnt what was i thinking.

Actually the laser light, any light/photon has momentum despite no rest mass. Meaning that the laser was in fact pushing the cups. I've seen videos of people using big/light levers to demonstrate/measure this.

try that adding some sound frecuency into laser

This is real Technomage stuff !

Great video as usual. You should use Tree Support, much easier to take off and uses less filament on your 3D prints.

I built a folding tv dinner table like yours with a larger than standard size platform board. Normally those are a smaller tabletop. I put stoppers at two heights, coffee table, and dinner table height. You could use the lasers to activate a explosive or combustable, but a magnetic railgun makes more sense. The lasers can be used to triangulate a field that could collapse signals and electronics of potential targets PWM regulation.

you'd better not try to push me over with this laser

Nice work

Light has no mass, but it does have momentum. Just a tiny amount. With about 300 MW you get 1 newton of force.

Figured you had something underneath to knock the cups - that used to be the standard trick for bottles "shot" in old movies -

at first i really got intrested into the hard light thing😅

Watched some of the video, then came back to watch the rest later. Suddenly, laser light is knocking over red cups.... Confused the hell out of me for a sec.

Nit-pick. Even though photons don't have mass, they are able to exert a very small force onto objects they collide with. This is a measurable force, and veretasium made a video about it

The Great Brutini!

James dabbles in stage magic now :p

"I don't like cosplay props" says the man who's built a full Hulkbuster outfit. 🙃

What if you were to print the supports with the same filament, and then where they connect print with the water soluble filament? I would think that should cut down on the amount of extruder switching and dissolving time

"I dont really make cosplay parts..." The whole reason I'm here is due to the giant hulkbuster suit 😂

Special effects were really cool, I heard a snap before you even moved your hand. Seemed like a nerf gun 5:43

Lol... Immortals of avium has a minimum requirement of an rtx 2080 super. EA needs to stop paying for promotion (no offense) and start paying for optimizations

Both a really good sponsor tie in and a clever solution! Did not expect the virtual space twist at all

I would personally like to see a 3D printed version of the SALTO robot. The 1 legged bouncing robot!

I mean this is much cooler and complex than the off screen pellet gun I was assuming.

I would be hard pressed to think of a more round about way of doing that.

How cool would it be to shoot something physical that’s tracked and use the laser to project a pattern on it. My afternoon just got a whole lot busier!

Hard light does technically exist right? Something about scientists making laser diamonds. I doubt it would be anything more than fractions of a millimeter large for fractions of a second. Also light doesn’t have mass but it does have energy. Solar sails do work to push spacecraft with light alone. Now it’s such a small amount that it only works in space with light objects and large sails. Any amount of gravity working against an object would overpower the sails.

Light doesn't have mass but it does have momentum. Science.

Really nice Video

Now if you used API calls to a cloud service, the convolution would be complete

How was the data transmitted to turn on the solendoids? Was that an ESP32 and bluetooth?

How do you dispose of the PVA water?

Photons have no mass, but they do have momentum.

You’re nuts. I love it

Haha I think everyone was thinking of an easy trick like shooting little transparent beads from the glove. But the real solution is on the completely other side of the prank engineering spectrum.

Nice !