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Disney Develops Room With 'Ubiquitous Wireless' Charging (cnet.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the cost-of-convenience dept.

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.

4 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Only one word.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Tesla

  2. 95% delivery efficiency, my ass. by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  3. Re:Yea, that's interesting... Not going to work by Hognoxious · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Or insert a goddam plug. OMG, that takes 30 seconds!

    Lazy fat entitled millenial fucking pansy hiptards.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  4. What??? by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "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...