David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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  • eldritch

    I would have appreciated a comparison of how it looks at a much higher framerate, to roughly simulate what our eyes would actually see. It’d help to reinforce the physics of what is happening.

  • http://illustratorhints.com/ Jesseham

    That’s too cool.  I wonder if the effect would work IRL if your lit a room with a matching frequency strobe…

    • Marius van Voorden

      Yes, it would :)

    • http://twitter.com/felixturner Felix Turner
      • http://illustratorhints.com/ Jesseham

        That’s awesome.

  • Brainspore

    Remember when that thing made friends with Ed Harris?

    • http://twitter.com/korrupted Marcellus King

      This comment deserves more likes 

  • xzzy

    Too bad James Cameron didn’t know about this trick back in the 80′s or he’d have abused the shit out of it for his T-1000 melting scene.

  • TacoChuck

    If I am understanding this correctly, it is the hose bouncing that is making the water appear like, the water itself is not being held in that pattern by the sound waves. What is happening is that the end of the hose is being bounced which is making the water fall in that pattern.

    • GlyphGryph

      Yes. Each “piece” of water is following a set curve, but since we only see that piece every so many fractions of a second…

    • SamSam

      Yes, it’s called the Wagon wheel effect, where the spokes of a wagon wheel — or the propellors of a helicopter or jet engine — appear to slow down, become stationary, and/or reverse.

      We see this so often with propellors in movies that I know many people who think that real propellors actually look like this to the naked eye — they don’t, it’s just an effect of the movie frame-rate.

      In this case the water is waving back-and-forth, but each frame of the camera happens to sync up to when the wave was exactly where it was last time, so the wave appears to be stationary.

  • SomeGuyNamedMark

    Now just install this in a men’s room.

  • PhasmaFelis

    This loses a lot by not showing us (something approximating) what it would look like in person. Just an ordinary hose spray?

    • http://twitter.com/bradbelltv Brad Bell

      The video does show us what it’s like in person. The frame of the video doesn’t add to the effect. And there is no strobe. Just the house bouncing in response to sound waves from the speaker. 

      • SamSam

        …no, the effect you’re seeing is precisely because of the video frames. See my post above about the wheel wagon effect, or the video below with the helicopter.

        In real life this would just look like a hose waving back and forth, and wouldn’t look odd at all..

  • SvenOrtmann

    It’s quite the same effect as with the helicopter whose main rotor doesn’t seem to move (same frequency as camera, again).

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O020Bh9O4qo

  • autark

    “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke

  • jheiss

    I thought it was interesting that when the actual speaker sound leaked through briefly it sounded rather like a film projector, cause, well 24 frames per second…

  • http://profiles.google.com/joel.moore Joel Moore

    Boston’s Museum of Science had (still has?) a similar interactive demonstration where you can “freeze” an arc of water droplets in midair by adjusting the frequency of a strobe light. Or you could tweak the rate to make them slowly march to the left or right. I remember playing with this 30+ years ago.

  • http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios

    I was hoping to see what would happen if he moved his hand or a stick through the water, to try and get a sense of how it would look IRL.

  • cabalist

    OMG, MAGIC!

    …and the Arthur C. Clarke quote, of course…

  • Brad Ackerman

    For SCIENCE!