Guy on TikTok Built a "Tractor Beam"

[MC_Lovecraft]

Here's a link to one of his videos showing it off. It's obviously using acoustic levitation to hold the droplet in place, but the interesting thing to me is that in this clip he is able to upend the device and have the droplet remain suspended, whereas AFAIK in most setups (and in his initial video demonstrating his device) moving the sound-emitting element results in the droplet "sliding off" of the levitation effect and falling. He has also demonstrated the ability to raise and lower the position of the droplet with a button press. He posted a video claiming to demonstrate that the droplet is not suspended on a wire, which is not very convincing given the quality of the video, but the appearance of the levitation does look very much in line with what typical acoustic levitation looks like, so I'm not convinced that it is a wire either, just that he hasn't been doing the best job of responding to the understandably critical comments posted on his videos.

What do y'all think? Is there something I'm missing that makes this an obvious fraud? Is there any practical application for this that you can think of? It seems a little bit like something that will end up being used in some incredibly niche industrial capacity and then also Air-Hockey 2.0 or something.

 

[Ford Prefect]

What do y'all think?

Click to shrink...

My immediate thought based on watching a couple of videos that it would probably be about as difficult to fake what's going as it would be to just do it legitimately lol

As for applications, I remember once reading about acoustic levitation being potentially used in some parts of microchip manufacture, and there are acoustic tweezers that have biomedical applications. My understanding is that you basically can only use it on very small objects, like I've seen a guy pick up a rock with the sound from a didgeridoo but much more than that is maybe a stretch. I'm no expert, though.