Most experimental displays swap one kind of light-emitting element for another — different pixels, same basic idea. A hobbyist working under the name Soiboi Soft skipped light entirely. Their latest build is a 64-pixel dot-matrix display that runs on nothing but vacuum and silicone, and to prove it’s a real display and not just a neat physics demo, they used it to play Pong and Snake.
From a single suction-driven digit to a working matrix
This isn’t a first attempt. Back in April, Soiboi Soft built a single suction-driven seven-segment display — a proof of concept that a vacuum could pull a flexible surface into a legible shape. The new build scales that idea up by an order of magnitude: an 8×8 grid of pixels, each one a small silicone membrane stretched over a cavity. Apply vacuum, and the membrane gets pulled inward, creating a visible hollow. Release it, and the pixel returns to flat. Sixty-four of those, wired into a grid, becomes a display.
Pneumatic “transistors” doing the switching
The trick that makes 64 individually addressable pixels practical without 64 individual vacuum lines is a set of pneumatic valves that behave like transistors. Each valve uses a control chamber where vacuum pulls a thin silicone membrane down, opening an internal passage that lets air flow through — the pneumatic equivalent of a switch closing. Multiplexed into four row and four column channels for the original 16-pixel prototype (and scaled further for the full 64-pixel version), the system programs a desired vacuum pattern into the column channels, then activates each row in sequence, letting every pixel in that row sample the column pressure simultaneously. It’s the same row/column scanning logic that drives an LED matrix — just built entirely out of air.
The pixels themselves behave like tiny capacitors: once a chamber is charged with vacuum and its valve closes, the trapped vacuum holds the silicone dot in position with no continuous power draw. That’s also what makes the display double as an input device — because a pixel’s state can be read back, “simply add some circuitry to read a pixel’s state, and it would be a fully-functioning touchscreen,” as the underlying mechanism is described in Hackaday’s coverage of the build.
Solving warping with an unglamorous fix
Scaling up from a single digit to a 64-pixel grid introduced a practical problem: the 3D-printed boards warped. Soiboi Soft’s fix was about as low-tech as the rest of the build is clever — completed boards were vacuum-clamped against glass inside protective TPU sleeves and annealed on a heated print bed until they flattened out. No redesign, no exotic material swap, just patient thermal correction.
Why it’s worth taking seriously
A vacuum-driven pixel is a fun party trick on its own. Turning sixty-four of them into something responsive enough to run Pong and Snake is a different bar entirely — it means the valve timing, the multiplexing, and the mechanical pixel response are all fast and consistent enough for real-time input, not just a slow animated pattern. That’s the difference between a materials demo and an actual display technology, and it’s what separates this build from most of the DIY air-powered-display projects that have popped up this year: a working games platform is a much harder thing to fake than a looping GIF.