WiTricity At CES

By Digital Trends Staff January 4, 2009

Imagine walking into a room and your cell phone beginning to charge automatically, even without a charger. Imagine, for that matter, not even needing chargers, or a tangle of wires around the house.

The concept of WiTricity, or wireless electricity, is likely to be one of the big commercial draws at CES this year. Cafes wouldn’t just be WiFi hotspots, but also electricity hotspots where you didn’t need to search for an outlet, according to the Guardian.

"You’d be able to buy a desk that charged any gadget placed on it, or power any PC you put on top," said James Holland, who edits Electricpig.co.uk.

"If each room had wireless power, you’d know that once you walked through the front door your mobile would start charging up – even while still in your bag or pocket. You’d never need to hunt for the right charger again."

One company exhibiting at CES is PowerBeam, which offers a simple idea. It turns electricity into an invisible laser that can be beamed across a room to a solar cell that converts it back into electricity. Currently the company can generate 1.5 watts of power and send it 10 meters. That’s not enough to charge a laptop, but it can be scaled up. As PowerBeam’s co-founder, David Graham said:

"We’re going to delete the word ‘recharge’ from the English dictionary. If your cell phone is recharging on your desk all day, you won’t be thinking about it."

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