Say goodbye to the tangle of cables and the wall socket and hello to powering up your electronic gizmos wirelessly.
This picture of a world without wires is one long dreamed of and came a step closer following significant progress made by Intel.
It said it has increased the efficiency of a technique for wirelessly powering consumer gadgets and computers.
“The notion of disappearing energy sources is a powerful one,” Justin Rattner, Intel technology boss, told the BBC.
“Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we didn’t think about where the power was coming from and the power was everywhere?” Justin Rattner, Intel technology boss stated. “No cords, no batteries anymore.”
Mr Rattner envisaged a scenario where a laptop’s battery could be recharged when the machine gets within several feet of a transmit resonator which could be embedded in tables, work surfaces, picture frames and even behind walls.
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.
“This is a potentially world changing event,” said analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group.
“This is the closest we’ve had to something being commercially available in this class.”
Mr Rattner admitted the technology is at least five years away, if not more, of becoming a reality.
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