WiTricity: Wireless electricity!

An MIT team demonstrates the possibility of powering up gadgets and electrical appliances wirelessly:

A team from MIT’s Department of Physics, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN) has experimentally demonstrated an important step toward accomplishing this vision of the future.

Realizing their recent theoretical prediction, they were able to light a 60W light bulb from a power source seven feet (more than two meters) away; there was no physical connection between the source and the appliance. The MIT team refers to its concept as “WiTricity” (as in wireless electricity). The work will be reported in the June 7 issue of Science Express, the advance online publication of the journal Science.

The concept is called WiTricity, which is short for wireless electricity. By using magnetically coupled resonators, they are able to transfer power from one source to another without the copper wires in between. You can reads the full article here, though a little wordy on physics, which explains how they did the experiments to prove this concept.

Can we finally say goodbye to batteries? Not yet, I think.