Researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Sussex in the UK have created the world's first sonic tractor beam. This tractor beam has the ability to pull, push and rotate objects that levitate in thin air. The researchers said that the technique can adapted for other uses as well.

In science fiction, a tractor beam is an invisible ray, which is used to hold and pull things in outer space. Scientists were quite interested in turning the idea of a tractor into reality. Study's lead researcher Asier Marzo said, "It was an incredible experience the first time we saw the object held in place by the tractor beam . All my hard work has paid off, it's brilliant".

The team has developed the tractor in collaboration with Ultrahaptics. In order to turn the idea into reality, the researchers used 64 small-sized loudspeakers to project sound waves having high-pitch and intensity. Main aim was to create a force field, which can hold an object.

Through the conscious control on the speaker's output, objects can be rotated or moved. Till now, the tractor beam is working in three holographic configurations- a pair of tweezers, a twister and a cage. But, the research team is going to go one step ahead and come up with different variations of the systems to be used for different applications.

In order to make advancements, researchers need to do lot of work like reduce the size of balls on the micron scale.