Further down the wireless charging road

Who needs wires or wall outlets? We can see the day, not too far in the future, when you can recharge your portable electronics devices without any of those old-fashioned power transference methods.

A group of scientists out of Japan have raised the bar even further with a sheet of plastic that can power up anything that happens to be placed up on it. There’s a catch, of course: That device that you want recharged has to have been outfitted with some special circuitry. That’s not a problem for the prototype, which has the circuitry built in. The idea is to make it flawless and then mass produce the circuitry.

The physics is simple yet complicated. It’s simple in that it is, at its heart, magnetic induction. It’s complex in that it is actually a two-step process, with one sheet sensing the position of an object and the other sheet doing the actual power transfer.

We’ve covered this sort of wireless charging before. This is something different again (although it builds on this), much more powerful yet still in the experimental stage.