Shoot Nanoparticles with an Electron Beam in Microscopic Video Game

Fans of video games are always waiting for the next big thing. There’s an ongoing race to create the most powerful gaming consoles, the most impressive graphics displays, and the most expansive worlds and stories. When it comes to gaming, bigger is usually better, but a team of researchers in Japan have recently taken games in the opposite direction, creating the smallest first person shooting game of all time. Despite the game’s small-scale, the implications could be huge!

Led by Professor Takayuki Hoshino, a team of researchers at Nagoya University’s Graduate School of Engineering in Japan crafted a mixed reality video game which merges the microscopic real world with a digital virtual overlay. The end result is a nanoscale game played on your television screen and in the real world. The results were published in the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics.

The world’s smallest video game lets players shoot microscopic plastic balls with an electron beam

Rather than controlling an interplanetary soldier or fighting unending waves of zombies, players of this new experimental video game fly a low-resolution triangular ship, representing a real-world electron beam. In place of alien invaders, players are up against an environment of tiny spheres made of polystyrene, roughly 1 billionth of a meter across. That’s about 100,000 times smaller than a human hair.

As the player, your goal is to navigate your ship through its microscopic environment, like the miniaturized submarine in Innerspace (streaming now on SYFY). The ship, of course, isn’t real. Instead, you’re controlling a high-speed electron beam which generates electric fields acting on the nanospheres and moving them around.

Using a standard video game controller, players move the ship and fire virtual bullets, thereby changing the electric field generated by the beam and repelling the spheres. It’s like playing asteroids in miniature and in real life.

Mixed reality video games help to manipulate the miniature world

In addition to being fun, the interface connects the miniature and macroscopic worlds, allowing researchers to more easily manipulate tiny objects. It’s an important step toward creating systems capable of working with nanoscale materials. More than just video games, the process could have nanotechnology and biomedical engineering applications.

“We could 3D print the created objects in real time, potentially revolutionizing the world of 3D printing or use the same guidance technique to guide toxic agents to virus cells in living organisms and kill them,” Professor Hoshino said in a statement.

Don’t let anyone tell you that honing your gaming skills is a waste of time. In the future, you might be able to build miniature models or fight the flu with a gaming controller. In the meantime, you can catch Innerspace streaming now on SYFY!