Sony Reveals Efficient Wireless Power Technology Comments

Aren't Microwaves, WiFi and Mobile Phones frying our brains already? Do we need another contender? Will we even care?

Have these people never heard of Nikola Tesla? He had wireless power working at the start of last century and I've had a kettle that conducts for years, Pah !!!

as good as it sounds, i don't think wireless power is something we really want, knowing that it's very likely to have some sort of health impact on us over time. If only all the peripherals were wireless on the other hand, that is more realistic and desirable, no need for HDMI cables (scart etc are to be phased out), already released I know but ideally, all new devices should have a wireless chip to transfer the data, be it visual or audio, or simply files. The problem is every major manafacturer wants their own format/idea to be the standard, so it's unlikely to happen, at least for a long time!

Haha! Threatening glance - genius.. Pick ANY Family Guy character and there's your glance!

Sony? Standards battle?

80% seems rather low, what's the efficiency of the average power cord?

60%? Yeah c'mon, lets fry the planet for the sake of fashion, at least we'll hand it over to our kids all bling 'n' that.

To be honest I think this is AMAZING. That kind of efficiency although not practical for large drain devices is still more than good enough to charge your phone or laptop on some kind of charging pad under your desk at maybe 10-20cm. The science behind this is amazing its SO hard to transmit power wirelessly with any real efficiency over distance. I've done projects on the effects of magnetic force with distance, to even get near 20% at that distance is outstanding. (Think how a magnetic field works, the field lines spread in all different directions, they have basically concentrated them almost perfectly.)

So we're going to replace a couple of feet of cable with two amplifier sized 19 inch black boxes, worth every penny of the three figure sum they'll doubtless cost, wow! and you get to use more electricity thus cutting down on the central heating bills!

@Xenos: 2 billion mobile phones is a pretty large drain device.

i don't get what these companies are trying to do (intel, sony) showing wireless power prototypes that could quite frankly be knocked up in your garage on a weekend. look at the size of the boxes. to attain that sort of efficiency at that range almost certainly requires large coils (to get good coupling) - hence the large boxes, which is unlikely to change.
gordon - yes technology has to start somewhere but the basics of this are 100 years old (transformers, hf coils, etc). this is the wireless power consortium site which has less ambitious but more realistic plans for wireless power and has a useful section on the real physics/engineering of this subject
http://www.wirelesspowerconsortium.com/technology/index.html
note the ICNIRP standard!

Xiphias: Where did you get 2 billion from? We are not suggesting that ALL mobiles in the country be powered by ONE single unit. Or do you actually have 2 billion mobile phones lying around your house that need charging?

@drdark @enigmatic2u No, this has no health problems. It's magmatic resonance. It transmits a magnetic field and that induces the electricity into the receiver. There's is no wave of anything that even remotely affects us going into the air. Magnetic fields have zero effect on us, even the Earth's ;)

There's a very interesting TED talk demonstrating wireless power to a TV, you might want to include with this news article Gordon.

http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_giler_demos_wireless_electricity.html

Mr. Godfrey: Individual power consumption isn't an issue, you could run a house on wireless electricity that was only 10% efficient and you'd notice absolutely no difference. However if you switch the entire world to wireless electricity that's more than a percent or two less efficient than wires and you're looking at a huge amount of extra energy needed, more power stations etc.

p.s. If it was one device that could power everything that it might even stack up pretty favourably as you don't have the cost of manufacturing/recycling millions of power cables.

This is a simply brilliant idea. I can't wait for my neighbours to buy into this so I can buy some receiver units. Free electricity forever!