You know how in gun fight scenes in some Hollywood movies, the guns never run out of ammunition? However bad guns are, those scenes portrayed a perfect world where things never run out. But we are not here to talk about guns; we are here to explore another modern day invention that, in real life, always run out: battery. But very soon, the Hollywood’s never-run-out-of-ammunition-gun may apply to AA battery too and we have Ossia to thank. The company’s Cota technology is much like Disney’s wireless charging room, but in a scale one can only dream of.
With Cota, it will charge your devices, or in the case of Cota AA battery, the AA battery, anywhere wirelessly as long as the devices/battery is within the range of Ossia base station. Think of the base station as a radio station of sort where the reach is far and wide, and obstacles like walls will never be an issue. The technology is in itself complex, but Ossia has found a way to shrink this complicated tech to fit into a size of a standard battery. How it works is, the the equipped devices, or the battery as in this case, will send out a signal to the base station at 100 times per second.
The array of tiny antennas on the base station picks up the signal and compute the exact location, accounting for walls and other obstacles, of the device/battery. Once the location is mapped out, the base station will than transmit powerful RF signals along this invisible route to the target where it then receive and turn the signals into usable power. The result is a device/battery that essentially won’t run of juice, ever. Sounds too good to be true? Well, as it turns out, it is not. Rest assure that Cota is very real and our dream of endless power is not a far future tech anymore.
When the company’s all-in-chip can be shrunk down to a size to fit into a smartphone, our woes of battery life will be history. But it is not without concerns. Concerns like how the RF signals may affect us physically and how it may affect other operating devices. And then there is the question of how the ability of the base station to determine a device location may compromise our privacy with respect to location et cetera. Those concerns and possibly more will no doubt be surface in time when the technology is made available. Also, there’s also question of how the implementation of the infrastructure of this forever power and the cost involved.
That also brings us to the question of what will it cost for consumers. Surely, it can’t be free right? That being said, words on the pricing and availability are not known yet, but one thing for sure, battery that never run out juice is in peering over the horizon.
Images: Ossia.
via Geek.
