In between inventing new kinds of Mickey Mouses and keeping the robots in the Hall Of Presidents from achieving sentience, engineers at Disney Research may have invented a crazy new way to make wireless charging a reality. This comes from Gizmodo, which reports that the researchers published a paper in the Plos One journal describing their plan and how it works. Essentially, their system can pump “around 1900 watts of energy” into an entire room “with an efficiency of 40 to 95 percent,” and there are only three or four major drawbacks to the system that would prevent any rational person from having it installed.
For starters, any room in which you’d want to use this wireless charging system must have aluminum-lined walls, and there must be a copper pipe extending from the floor to the ceiling right in the middle of the room with 15 capacitors installed inside. Also, you actually need to have devices in the room using the wireless power, because otherwise the amount of energy being generated could be dangerous to the human body, and you must never get within 46 centimeters to the pole or else it will (we assume) melt all of the skin off of your face like in Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Other than that, though, it’ll be like living in a magical little energy cave where your phone never dies and the lights cannot be turned off unless you disengage the power pole.
Of course, people living during the advent of in-home electricity probably thought filling your walls with wires was similarly ridiculous, and Gizmodo points out that these issues could be fixed “with a more reactive system and some interior design,” so maybe these drawbacks aren’t quite as bad as they seem.