Pedestrian power: prototype power-source footwear
There’s nothing worse than being halfway through a long walk around the city only to have your MP3 player run out of juice[1]. Wouldn’t it be great if you could keep it charged up just by walking?
Japanese electronics company NTT Docomo evidently thinks so, as they’ve been showing off a prototype shoe that can generate 1.2 Watts of power through the motion of their wearer.
Spiraltwist at grinding.be neatly sums up my feelings: “Concept is excellent, design needs to be refined.” That said, Docomo reckons the finished version will be on the market by 2010, by which time there’ll be plenty more pocket-sized gimcracks to plug it into… provided they have compatible plugs and sockets, natch. [image from linked DVICE article]
While we’re on the subject of wearable tech, Gizmodo has a round-up of geeksome gadgetry that means you can have your cyberpunk future rightfreakingnow… provided you don’t mind looking like a fool. I mean, trousers with a keyboard and speakers built in? Come on… [via Hack-a-Day]
[ 1 - OK, there are plainly plenty of things worse than this, but I thought I'd go for upbeat today; it's a Tuesday, after all. ]
October 24th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
And that shoe would produce around 1.2 Gigawatts of paranoia in the vicinity of a US airport.