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.

Comments

I've read this story before

[dlleigh]

Robert Heinlein's "Waldo": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Tesla (not the car company)

[subk]

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.

Re:95% delivery efficiency, my ass.

[guruevi]

The paper says 40%-95%. The heat map indicates 95% would be only right around the center of the room and it drops off quite quickly (exponential, because physics).