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Tech

This Video Shrinks You Down to the Surface of a Soap Bubble

ASMR for your eyes and ears.

When you think of autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR, you usually think of someone whispering softly in your ear or delicately snipping your hair. It's hard to describe, but imagine it as the aural and physical sensation of getting a perfect buzzcut. More broadly, it's when your head feels a little tingly after hearing something pleasurable. And no, it's not a sex thing unless you make it one.

This video gives you a bit of a sense of how ASMR might feel when you're close enough to soap bubbles to hear their layers swirl around and pop. While the sound was just added in post-production via Foley technique, the visuals are all real. The video brings you up close to see the psychedelic colors on the bubbles' filmy exteriors.

In brief, those wild-looking color formations, called iridescence, are caused by white light hitting the bubble at different angles, with some light getting trapped in the bubble and the rest being reflected off the surface. The light within the bubble gets reflected too, but it travels a different length than the original wave, causing the colors reflected on the bubble's surface to be different.

And since the bubble's surface changes in thickness as it gets closer to popping, the light reflected will change wavelengths constantly. That's what causes all those trippy paisley-patterned colors.