Unplugged.

So, the BBC is talking about one of Nikola Tesla’s dreams (he of the AC current and the plasma ball) coming true in an Intel lab, where engineers are broadcasting power wirelessly:

Intel’s technology relies on an idea called magnetic induction. It is a principle similar to the way a trained singer can shatter a glass using their voice; the glass absorbs acoustic energy at its natural frequency.

At the wall socket, power is put into magnetic fields at a transmitting resonator – basically an antenna. The receiving resonator is tuned to efficiently absorb energy from the magnetic field, whereas nearby objects do not.

…

Intel’s demonstration has built on work done originally by Marin Soljacic, a physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, researcher Alanson Sample showed how to make a 60-watt light bulb glow from an energy source three feet away.

As a model, they’re using the idea of a laptop that recharges whenever it’s in the same room as the transmitter, but if you think about it, that’s just a tiny part of what this system could do.

This could change everything.

Tags: engineering, physics