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The article itself is typical TC: a credulous PR puff-piece, not journalism of any kind. The best way to prove that something works is a demo. This story is a

The article itself is typical TC: a credulous PR puff-piece, not journalism of any kind. The best way to prove that something works is a demo. This story is about documents that could as well be science fiction, not a live demonstration of working devices. And the specifications they have published don't do much to allay the safety concerns that have been raised based on patent filings; if anything, they confirm them. The only really new piece of data here is that the frequency is much lower than previously speculated, which will reduce attenuation at the cost of being well within domestic animals' hearing ranges. All UBeam has to do to put a stop to accusations of fraud is have someone independent demo and use the device in public. If it exists. It's that simple.

timpattinson 11y ago
Agreed: with several years and tens of millions in investments, if it was possible, they would have some kind of demo.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  This is where it gets tricky. They said they had a working demo (and this is corroborated by a number of investors) on which proper DD was performed prior to investing. I'm really not sure what to make of this. On the one hand it has me very skeptical on the other hand the number of reputations that will be tarnished forever if this turns out to be vapourware is substantial. You'd hope that those people putting their money and reputations on the line really did do their homework, uBeam would not deserve to get out of the gate let alone raise capital like that if their prototype never worked in the first place, it's not that easy to rig a demo for a savvy tech DD team (though I can assure you it has been tried). What bugs me is that uBeam is on the defensive all the time they should just show their tech or be very quiet. No need to tell the world it works if you can't show it, who is the intended audience of all this 'good news'? Or do they have a bunch of unruly investors to keep quiet who are getting antsy and are starting to pick up on the skepticism? That might actually explain all this attention diversion, attention that might be better used elsewhere (assuming this thing can work at all).
  - Animats 11y ago
    They had a working demo in 2012. Here it is.[1] You're looking at a single big ultrasonic transducer sending to a bunch of little ones. The little ones are the same ones RobotShop sells.[2] They're very vague about how much energy went in and how much came out. The big heat sinks on the sending side suggest that a few hundred watts are going in. The meter on the receive side is just showing voltage, so there's no indication of the actual energy transfer. There's no beam forming or steering. Anybody could reproduce that demo, but it doesn't prove much. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoHxyweJcZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoHxyweJcZI [2] http://www.robotshop.com/ca/en/hc-sr04-ultrasonic-range-finder.html http://www.robotshop.com/ca/en/hc-sr04-ultrasonic-range-find...
    - fredkbloggs 11y ago
      Right, to me a useful demo has to have several attributes to prove the concept: 1. It has to take place in a real-world setting, perhaps a vacant hotel room or a coffee shop that has closed for the day. 2. It has to be monitored by independent technicians who can verify that the energy transmission is occurring via ultrasound, not some other means. 3. The transmitter has to be plugged into a normal wall socket (to establish a lower bound on efficiency). 4. The receiver needs to show how much electrical power it is producing, and that needs to be at least 3W. 5. The receiver needs to be held by a human, and for part of the demo the human should be walking slowly in a straight line. After all, it's not that the transmission of energy via ultrasound is physically impossible. No one is asserting that (including, hilariously, the professors this "reporter" got to acknowledge is within the laws of physics). The question is whether they have the technology they claim, such that a reasonable person might plausibly hope to refine into a marketable product. To me, a demo showing all of that would prove the key technologies: namely, beamed power transmission via ultrasound to a working receiver, receiver tracking, and at least basic short-term safety for humans. That doesn't mean there's a viable product here, of course; such a device might still be unsafe in many ways, it might be a hazard to animals, it might be far too inefficient to be useful, it might not be able to track more complex motion reliably, it might not work well or at all with multiple receivers, etc., etc., etc. That's the "multiplicative risks" people mention and many of the objections to a marketable product would still apply. But many companies have technically functional products they fail to bring to market or make a profit from, without being fraudulent. Multiplicative risks apply to almost any new product concept. Having a device that, whether marketable or not, clearly has the essential attributes that they claim would at least quiet the charges of fraud.

timpattinson 11y ago

Agreed: with several years and tens of millions in investments, if it was possible, they would have some kind of demo.

jacquesm 11y ago
This is where it gets tricky. They said they had a working demo (and this is corroborated by a number of investors) on which proper DD was performed prior to investing. I'm really not sure what to make of this. On the one hand it has me very skeptical on the other hand the number of reputations that will be tarnished forever if this turns out to be vapourware is substantial. You'd hope that those people putting their money and reputations on the line really did do their homework, uBeam would not deserve to get out of the gate let alone raise capital like that if their prototype never worked in the first place, it's not that easy to rig a demo for a savvy tech DD team (though I can assure you it has been tried). What bugs me is that uBeam is on the defensive all the time they should just show their tech or be very quiet. No need to tell the world it works if you can't show it, who is the intended audience of all this 'good news'? Or do they have a bunch of unruly investors to keep quiet who are getting antsy and are starting to pick up on the skepticism? That might actually explain all this attention diversion, attention that might be better used elsewhere (assuming this thing can work at all).
- Animats 11y ago
  They had a working demo in 2012. Here it is.[1] You're looking at a single big ultrasonic transducer sending to a bunch of little ones. The little ones are the same ones RobotShop sells.[2] They're very vague about how much energy went in and how much came out. The big heat sinks on the sending side suggest that a few hundred watts are going in. The meter on the receive side is just showing voltage, so there's no indication of the actual energy transfer. There's no beam forming or steering. Anybody could reproduce that demo, but it doesn't prove much. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoHxyweJcZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoHxyweJcZI [2] http://www.robotshop.com/ca/en/hc-sr04-ultrasonic-range-finder.html http://www.robotshop.com/ca/en/hc-sr04-ultrasonic-range-find...
  - fredkbloggs 11y ago
    Right, to me a useful demo has to have several attributes to prove the concept: 1. It has to take place in a real-world setting, perhaps a vacant hotel room or a coffee shop that has closed for the day. 2. It has to be monitored by independent technicians who can verify that the energy transmission is occurring via ultrasound, not some other means. 3. The transmitter has to be plugged into a normal wall socket (to establish a lower bound on efficiency). 4. The receiver needs to show how much electrical power it is producing, and that needs to be at least 3W. 5. The receiver needs to be held by a human, and for part of the demo the human should be walking slowly in a straight line. After all, it's not that the transmission of energy via ultrasound is physically impossible. No one is asserting that (including, hilariously, the professors this "reporter" got to acknowledge is within the laws of physics). The question is whether they have the technology they claim, such that a reasonable person might plausibly hope to refine into a marketable product. To me, a demo showing all of that would prove the key technologies: namely, beamed power transmission via ultrasound to a working receiver, receiver tracking, and at least basic short-term safety for humans. That doesn't mean there's a viable product here, of course; such a device might still be unsafe in many ways, it might be a hazard to animals, it might be far too inefficient to be useful, it might not be able to track more complex motion reliably, it might not work well or at all with multiple receivers, etc., etc., etc. That's the "multiplicative risks" people mention and many of the objections to a marketable product would still apply. But many companies have technically functional products they fail to bring to market or make a profit from, without being fraudulent. Multiplicative risks apply to almost any new product concept. Having a device that, whether marketable or not, clearly has the essential attributes that they claim would at least quiet the charges of fraud.