Having to plug your phone in every night probably bums you out. Near-field wireless chargers like the ones Samsung sells are cool, but short-range. Like, the phone has to be sitting on the plate, at which point, you could just plug it in. And while some science is out there that says devices might be able to harvest electricity from ambient Wi-Fi, that just doesn't provide enough power.
One possible solution? Here is a hint: Pew pew!
A team of electrical engineers at the University of Washington are suggesting that, yes, the solution to all your charging problems is lasers. "You could build a phone case that had the receiver integrated into it, and then buy the laser setup," says Vikram Iyer, the lead author of a paper the team wrote about the idea. (He works in the same big lab that came up with a cell phone that doesn't need batteries[1].) "Obviously you'd want to make that smaller, nicer, and prettier, but it could be a standalone thing, like a Wi-Fi router."
You have just mounted an eyeball-bursting laser turret in the corner of your room, and it is shooting at you.
In other words, you put your phone down anywhere in a room, the laser finds the phone, and beams its collimated light into a photovoltaic cell—like a solar cell but tuned for a focused dose of near-infrared.
Just one little obstacle: You have just mounted an eyeball-bursting laser turret in the corner of your room, and it is shooting at you. Why not just hook it to the Internet of Hackable Robot Doom Things while you're at it, genius?
Other people have pitched lasers as a way to power stuff as...