...but drones use so much power that it's unsustainable beyond demos. Beaming power to them suddenly makes this useful because you can keep them flying indefinitely.
I'll predict that if Disney actually have this working beyond a prototype, we'll see demos of drone swarms building complex objects out of children's bricks within a year, and prototypes of tool-wielding drones actually doing assembly within another.
It also increases the weight of the payload they can move around since they wouldn't have batteries (unless the weight of the receiving coils overwhelms that).
Thanks! I left out a few words - I specifically was thinking about what Disney Imagineers might use this for at a Disney park. Are they developing some new tech for use in a new land, perhaps? [1]
1.9 kilowatts is a sizable amount of power. In comparison a DJI phantom 4 consumes about 175 watts[0]. One could probably keep a decently large drone in the air indefinitely.
Unteathered completely wireless vr springs to mind as a potential advancement in the tech. Depends on how much the headsets draw can be reduced by with foveated rendering.
I mean they can, yes, at a maximum. The article says "80% of the room’s 54 m^3 total volume being able to deliver wireless power to a receiver at over of 40% efficiency" which means it's 760 watts of uncertain power (because it can drop off further than that). That's more in the range of high power computers... which I guess wouldn't be a concern.
So this could totally be used for a HMD already. I wonder if it interferes at all with data transmission protocols that are used for wireless on the currently available HMDs...
