Slashdot Mirror
Disney Develops Room With 'Ubiquitous Wireless' Charging (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: The scientific and tech arm of the entertainment giant Disney has built a prototype room with "ubiquitous wireless power delivery" that allows several devices to be charged wirelessly in much the way we get internet access through Wi-Fi. By tapping quasistatic cavity resonance, researchers discovered they could generate magnetic fields inside specially built structures to deliver kilowatts of power to mobile devices inside that structure. "This new innovative method will make it possible for electrical power to become as ubiquitous as WiFi," Alanson Sample, associate lab director and principal research scientist at Disney Research, told Phys.org. "This in turn could enable new applications for robots and other small mobile devices by eliminating the need to replace batteries and wires for charging." All you have to do is be in the room and your device will start charging automatically. And depending on where you are in the room, delivery efficiency can be as high as 95 percent, researchers said. There is one potential issue: you have to not mind being in a room constructed mostly of aluminum, that includes the walls, ceiling and floor. There's a copper pole in the middle of the room, and 15 discrete high quality factor capacitors that separate the magnetic field from the electric field.
just sayin'.
Why not just make the USB standard have a circular axis like a headphone jack!
it is called industrial microwave oven.
Ok, so I will get to charge my device this way. Very nice, my device's charger outputs 5V and 1200 mA, so it draws 6W of energy while charging.
How much energy does this room draw from the grid, in order to provide my device - and possibly others as well in the room - the 6W it needs? If we call that number 'x', I would like to see the result y, as in y = 6/x.
It would be the efficiency indicator I seek for such awesome new tech.
I, for one, would be wearing tin foil underpants.
Gee I hope my pacemaker doesn't explode in my chest.
Anybody ever read The Terminal Man? Anybody? Because that's the future. Luckily Michael Crichton isn't alive to witness this idiocy.
My energy filled room at home is a little smaller, so I only use it for heating up burritos.
Tesla
So no wi-fi or cell signal while the phone is charging: I assume the magnetic power field would silence any radio repeater inside the room. Can the aluminium be a quarter of milimetre thickness; not sheeting but not al-foil either?
Robert Heinlein's "Waldo": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You guys test it out and let us know how well it works.
Obviously this "delivery efficiency" number is the efficiency after converting the power to RF and before it's converted back into electricity. So basically, 95% is the maximum amount of RF that is intended to hit your phone's charging coil actually will.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
"This enables power to be transmitted efficiently to receiving coils that operate at the same resonant frequency as the magnetic fields."
So, there would have to be a standard or your phone charger only works at Disney.
My phone didn't come with receiving coils at that freq, You can just add that to your iPhone right?!? Are these 'coils' flat i.e. just how much battery life do we sacrifice to recharge wirelessly.
Aren't Aluminum rooms with copper poles in them going to have to become a LOT more common for this to be 'ubiquitous' ?
ok, sounds nice for robots. Not so much for my living room where i want the robot :(
Amazon warehouse I guess, but that hardly seems fair as they already have cool robots.
Don't take any device that couples magnetic energy in there. No credit cards, no spinning hard disks, a lot of electronic devices will be toasted upon entry and should you happen to have any leftover metal parts from some past surgery (staples, clips, knees or hips) you don't likely want to try and enter either... Figure on having similar entry restrictions as MRI machines, including the faraday shielded room for this thing.. I wonder what a set of wire rimmed glasses will do in there, in fact anything that approximates a loop of wire could have serious issues if it's conductive.
Basically they put you INSIDE a huge electromagnet with fairly high flux values. They resonate the whole thing to a specific frequency by inserting some capacitance, then size their collector (which is still larger than most cell phones) can collect power from the magnetic fields. Room size will be limited, basically because of the power density required to get useful power transfer is still really high and it will approach unsafe levels as the room gets larger.
Not to mention... I dare you to grab the center pole.... It's going to have more than hundred amps flowing though it at RF (1.3 Mhz) frequencies that, despite what they say in their "safety" calculations, sure seems to be at power levels that can cause serious RF burns...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
capacitors that separate the magnetic field from the electric field.
What the actual flux?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/major-cell-phone-radiation-study-reignites-cancer-questions/
Real Genius
Wouldn't installing a Tesla coil have a similar effect?
Does this mean that it will continuously charge your pacemaker even if you do not want it to? What about the metal (platinum or titanium) bolts and wiring holding your previously broken bones together, built in leg warmers?
Definitely excited for this technology, hope they can simplify it down and make it practical since I am guessing there is not good cellular reception inside a metal room. An obvious application for this would be inside aeroplanes to reduce the numbers of wires installed to power the seat back entertainment systems or overhead lighting.
A century ago, Nikola Tesla was convinced he could do this over great distances using broadcast towers (for lack of a better term). Due to what essentially amounts to corporate sabotage of his endeavors, we never got to find out if he was right.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
That apple wingnuts thought that apple wireless charging was going to be. They were all so sure of it.
Apparently he had a coil about 8 feet off the floor along the walls. Another coil placed at the same level would get current induced in it by the alternating current circulating in the loop. He published the work about resonant inductive coupling in the years 1891, 1892 and 1893. (Links stolen shamelessly from wikipedia.)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Get a charge in a room with a central metal pole.
Bring on the dancer.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
One of my favorite Simpsons scenes (Ned's destroyed house has been rebuilt by his neighbors): https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
So, aluminum walls, alluminum floors, copper pole in the middle -- I do believe that's actually a battery, using the air as the electrolyte. I think I might be staying out of that room.
"you have to not mind being in a room constructed mostly of aluminum, that includes the walls, ceiling and floor."
Which means you also have to not mind being in a room where you're bombarded with lots of intense electrostatic and electromagnetic fields, which I doubt is good for anyone, especially infants and toddlers. Close proximity to electrostatic or electromagnetic fields on a long-term basis is NOT good for you, period.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
"discrete high quality factor capacitors that separate the magnetic field from the electric field."
What the fuck? That's NOT the way this shit works. This is utter nonsense.
For the record, capacitors DO NOT "separate the magnetic field from the electric field". No. No no no.
This is so wrong I don't even know where to begin.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I double dog dare you!
Are they calling the exhibit "The Cancer Of Tomorrow"?
The stripers will explode...
kilowatts of power to mobile devices inside that structure
Kilowatts? Now any phone can be like a Samsung!
all users were found to be left brained could no longer have creative thoughts.
They are building a battery that you can walk into.
Here's a link to the journal article that gives a lot more details. If you're a power electronics dork, it's a good read. Also, it clears up some of the BS statements in the submitter's article.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0169045
If you go to a Disney theme park, what do you do most of the day?
Wait in lines!
Why not charge people's phones while they wait in lines.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
www.craphound.com/makers/download/
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
With ordinary appliances you can be fairly certain they're safe if you pull the plug. With a gizmo that taps a wireless power source in your house you can never be.
If for some reason you want to do something to a device that's less than safe if it's plugged in you run a risk. If you want the device to be guaranteed shut off. e.g. because you want to clean it under the tap, or because it overheats (potentially causing a fire), or because you want to screw it open, you may have a serious problem.
If you want to ensure some sneaky piece of hardware (like a "smart" TV set with voice command operation) is really off ...you're out of luck. If you've bought an appliance with IOT functionality that you don't want on all the time ... tough.
As I've noted before, in this age of networked machines, the real issue is control. Who controls a given piece of hardware? You or the manufacturer? The manufacturer has several ways he can monetise control over an application. Ranging from privacy intrusion to enforcement of policies.
Most ordinary people, good little consumers as they are, have already lost this contest. Their "smart" hardware can be under manufacturer control for all they know and may phone home and collect and transmit personal ("anonimised") data back to the manufacturer as that manufacturer sees fit. This basically applies to anyone who uses a smartphone, a recent car, or any kind of networked piece of electronics in "consumer mode". Only people with interest in (and expertise in) hacking and controlling their stuff can retain control.
It will also allow the manufacturer to enforce all kinds of "policies" on the user of that appliance. E.g. a printer will stop printing when the ink cartridge tells it the allotted number of prints has been reached. Regardless of how much in is left in the cartridge. Or a "smart" espresso machine that refuses to work with any but the manufacturers own coffee cups. Or a console will refuse to play a non-authorised game. Several e-readers will refuse to display files that aren't on "allowed" servers, plus they will tattle about what you read, when, and for how long. If you're unable to run Wireshark on your home network (or simply lack the time) you may never know.
This cordless plug is simply the next step towards a world where individuals' control over their home and the stuff in it is diluted and either off-loaded to whichever party thinks they can monetise a little piece of control over your personal surroundings, or routed through some piece of electronics that exercises actual control instead of the appliances' owner and balk in an emergency.
If I want an appliance to work, I'll find somewhere to plug it in.