Future, taking shape.
We are developing holographic matter manipulation: shaped acoustic and electromagnetic fields that position and bond material directly. No moving parts. No tool paths. Fine structures, multimaterials, and controlled crystalline order — built in one machine.
A machine that moves matter. Without moving parts.
Nothing inside slides, spins, or reaches. The walls of a sealed volume shape acoustic and electromagnetic fields, and the interference pattern between them is the mold. An object is stored as a hologram — a recording of how it answers the field — and the same fields run in one direction or the other scan it, assemble it, or take it back apart.
Scan
Drop an object in and the walls ask it a question from every direction. What comes back is a hologram of the thing — roughly a megabyte for a mug, sharpening as more of the pattern arrives.
Assemble
Play the hologram back into an empty volume. Sound holds each grain from all sides like a marble in a bowl, carries it to where the pattern says, and focuses to weld it there.
Dissolve
Run it the other way and a finished part comes apart into loose grains. They fall back into the cartridge and become the raw material for the next thing you make.
Forget designing for manufacturing.
Draft angles, tool access, minimum wall thickness, split lines, assembly order — most of the constraints in a mechanical design exist to satisfy a machine. A field reaches everywhere in the volume at once, so the geometry you want is the geometry you build.
And it makes structures practical that have been out of reach: microstructured metamaterials, several materials integrated into one part with no joint between them, and crystalline order controlled through a component rather than left to chance.
What would you create?
Only correct answers allowed.
Building the First Replicator
Only the first one gets built the hard way. After that the Replicator is its own factory — and because parts can be assembled, a small machine is all it takes to make a bigger one.
The digital Replicator
The whole machine exists first as a physics-correct simulation. Perfect, with fields, materials, control loops and more; so the design is proven before a single part is cut.
v0 · The Real Replicator
The first machine comes off conventional shops: machined, wired, and assembled the old way. One time only.
v1 · The Bigger Replicator(s)
The Replicator will build the second, bigger replicator. A small machine still builds the parts a larger one is assembled from, so every generation makes the next one cheaper, finer, and bigger.
EtherWorks.
A deep-tech company developing holographic matter manipulation. Everything we design is published open source — because we would rather live in a world where a hundred groups extend this machine than one where one company owns it.
Progress notes, a few times a year.
New papers, machine milestones, and open problems we would like help with. No marketing.
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