9 ms·

UBeam's Meredith Perry shows her wireless charging technology really works

76 points by daegloe 9y ago

brians 9y ago
The reporters didn't see a tear down of the sleeves, and wouldn't be able to identify a battery if they had. They showed sleeves and a charging indicator, rather than a simple wattmeter. This was a fraud—though like many inventors of perpetual motion machines, it is plausible Perry first fooled herself that the battery in the sleeve is just "to cover the initial surge" or "until we can fix this efficiency problem." The important lesson here is that USA Today and similar papers can be fooled by a rigged demo and a sincere voice. Read the front page with similar skepticism!
- lern_too_spel 9y ago
  It would require a lot of engineering work just to fake a demo to have a battery that charges when the sleeve is in the beam and doesn't when it isn't or the beam is blocked. More likely, there is actual power transmitted and received but not enough to charge the battery when the phone is doing anything at all. The charging indicator will turn on if you're putting 50 mW in, but that's not going to do much good when displaying the charging indicator uses more power than that.
jacquesm 9y ago
Umm, not to be really nasty but did they do a teardown of those sleeves? You can buy a new phone but if you slip it into a sleeve that size then that still affords plenty of room for a rigged demo. (Sorry, professional deformation at work here.) What would be far better proof that it works is a simple caloric setup showing how much power is transferred per unit time at which distances and angles from the transducer tile. Also, where do the optical lasers come in? To find a target to steer beams to using phased arrays of transducers? If so that would imply only line-of-sight. edit: so yes, the article confirms line of sight only and very low levels of power delivery
- annerajb 9y ago
  I guess that's why they want to make them as roof tiles to cover a whole room with multiples of there and have continuous coverage.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Two points: 1) interference 2) efficiency Lots of transmitters will interfere with each other, you'll get all kinds of interference patterns at the receiver which will negatively impact efficiency. And to that point, the second efficiency issue is that you will spend a ton of money to get a trickle of power to those phones, an inductive coupled system in the base of the table would deliver a large multiple because of the tighter coupling (decreased distance, fewer losses because of the medium chosen, electromagnetic coupling is well understood and efficient, acoustic coupling is fraught with all kinds of inefficiencies and hard to make work in a practical setup with useful levels of power).
- jakob223 9y ago
  Is there doubt that it works or that it is practical? I find it unlikely they went through this rigamarole with a case that was actually just a battery case, but this demo hasn't proven that the product will be widely useful as was claimed.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Well, if all it did was light up the 'charging' indicator without delivering meaningful power then yes, it is believable. But if they actually stand by their original claims then I'd open up that box to see what's in it because with the air density being what it is there is no way you're going to deliver that kind of power between two surfaces of the size shown in the article using ultrasound. You're going to get so much interference between the emissions of the various transducers that you'll end up with a very small fraction of the input power on the receiving side.
  - jimrandomh 9y ago
    Yes, there is doubt about whether it works.
w1ntermute 9y ago
Analysis of the article by former uBeam VP of Engineering Paul Reynolds: > In all this time, have reporters still not learned to press on the key questions? "How much power is being received?", "How much is being sent?", "What's the efficiency?", "How much does it cost?", "Have you proved it safe?", and "If this is what you have now, what were all those 'prototypes' you were talking about 2 years ago?". But those are actual questions that matter, and basically we know the same today as we did yesterday (which indicates it was an awesome PR piece, lots of coverage with no actual info). http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/05/whats-in-picture.html http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/05/whats-in-pictur... http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/06/someone-was-paying-attention.html http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/06/someone-was-pay... http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/06/what-does-it-take-to-switch-phone.html http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/06/what-does-it-ta...
- averagewall 9y ago
  For safety, the transmitter could turn itself off if a receiver isn't receiving enough power. The receiver could radio back to the transmitter to identify its presence and power input.
  - aisofteng 9y ago
    Have you considered sending the engineering team thoughts like these, or any other offhand ones?
    - logicallee 9y ago
      You were downvoted, and my interpretation is that people thought you were sarcastic and thought that this was an inappropriate jab, and downvoted for this reason. I think they're right that you're being sarcastic, due to the word "offhand". However, if we read your comment seriously (you are seriously stating it) then I actually agree with it: this means the "wrong" part of your comment is the /s (which you didn't include) and otherwise your comment is very solid. I'd like to defend it. Here are just some of the off-hand ideas that were demonstrated in this video: - Beam forming - Vision for device tracking. (VISION!!! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW OFF-HAND OF AN IDEA THIS IS?) - Inclusion built into every manufactured phone and uBeam beamers located all over the place, so that even a trickle ends up recharging the phone "throughout the course of a day" -- assuming you aren't actually using it. - Have it be something you don't even notice. (So that for this reason it doesn't matter if it barely works). ie if you have your phone in your pocket for an hour while you sit and talk to your friend, it goes from 51% to 83% charge. That is a good and viable definition of "don't even notice it." These are extremely off-hand ideas. It is extremely possible that adding a dozen other extremely off-hand ideas are all that it would take to make this a viable, pervasive technology, built into everything. For example, it was demonstrated on a huge receiver that is much larger than the phone it was attached to. A couple of off-hand ideas about how to make the receiver smaller might be all it takes to make this more interesting. There are further possible off-hand ideas. add in about a dozen and, if they have appropriate patents, they have a monopoly on a charging solution. When you have a choice of two cafes across the street, and if you spend an hour in one of them your battery will be 10% more charged than before you entered, would you choose that one over the other one? You would if you were at 1% battery level and waiting for an important client. Bam. You've just made a case that this brings free users to cafes as a direct competitive advantage, much like having wifi might. And what was this -- oh, right: an off-hand marketing idea I just had. Don't dismiss off-hand ideas. If you like, it's all Steve Jobs ever contributed. Send them - send them all. You might end up making uBeam work. Note: I have no association with the company or any horse in this game.
ogezi 9y ago
I was really skeptical about her company but the pictures in the article and the article itself seem legit. I wonder how they'll combat the inverse square law and make their technology actually feasible.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  From this no details article, how can you determine that versus a small battery pack in the case?
  - jclarkcom 9y ago
    I'm thinking about drones if it could work over longer distances, 24hr survailence
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      That's significantly more energy than they are able to transmit. Drones consume a lot of power.
- trsohmers 9y ago
  Not to be defending/advocating that uBeam's tech is actually any good, but the inverse square law refers to omnidirectional transmission, while uBeam's claims are related to directional transmission of power.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Have you ever seen an audio frequency transducer (say up to 200 KHz) that delivered an actual beam? Usually the inverse square law is very much in effect when it comes to audio, this is because the medium (waves in air) behaves as water does with waves do in a pond rather than say the light coming out of a laser or any other focused source of electromagnetic radiation. Distance from the transmitter will very much be a factor.
    - 9y ago
samfisher83 9y ago
Transmitting energy through the air is going to be inherently less efficient than wires. It looks like you will have to have a direct line of sight. Wireless energy transmission Bankrupted Tesla and he had a lot money back then, and he was one of the smartest people ever. 26 Million dollars seems like a lot of money to put into a project like this when physics would seem to dictate it isn't going to work.
- rhinoceraptor 9y ago
  It could still be useful if it could charge your phone/laptop all the time without you needing to worry about or manage it. And in that case it doesn't need to be as efficient as a wire since it can start charging as soon as you get home until you leave.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    > It could still be useful if it could charge your phone/laptop all the time without you needing to worry about or manage it. And without you using it. As soon as you start using it you'll be back to normal, and likely there would not be enough power to put a meaningful charge into anything the size of a laptop with this system. Unless phones are going to use a small fraction of the power they use today I don't see this working in practical setups. > And in that case it doesn't need to be as efficient as a wire since it can start charging as soon as you get home until you leave. 10 seconds plugged in to a wire would give you more juice than an hour or two hooked up to those transducer arrays.
    - dsr_ 9y ago
      Nobody has yet mentioned, perhaps because it's obvious: every time you change the density of the medium in the path of the sound beam, you get reflection or refraction losses. Hands are much denser than air. Not only does UBeam need to track where the receiver is, they need to hit the target without going through your hand or body to avoid another large efficiency loss -- I believe the typical figure for air/soft tissue boundaries is 99%.
- 9y ago
monk_e_boy 9y ago
"Your phone could be at 1% charged all day." Wow, phones are something like 60% battery at the moment. Imagine cutting that in half?! Phones could become much more powerful.
jimrandomh 9y ago
This is fake. They got some gullible reporters to plug their phones into black boxes, which are supposedly receiving power. In reality, those boxes contain sensors to tell them when to pretend to receive power, plus batteries. If it were real, they would've given the demo to someone with technical sophistication. They wouldn'tve bothered taking a trip to a phone store, since all the observers already had their own phones. And, also, the laws of physics would be slightly different. But this scam isn't aimed at us. It's aimed at investors, who will never read this Hacker News thread, or any other thread where smart people are around to debunk it. Because if they did read that sort of thing, they wouldn't be an investor.
- icelancer 9y ago
  This is not fake. It is real. It is, however, put on display in a such a way that masks all the very real limitations on such technology. The sensors + batteries in the box is an absurd claim.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    > The sensors + batteries in the box is an absurd claim. No more absurd than that uBeam will deliver meaningful power using ultrasound. So if they are going to show a demo that does what they claimed originally then the contents of the box would definitely be subject to scrutiny. I've had a really nice rigged demo tried on me during a tech DD once and that tech was a lot more believable than what is on display here so some skepticism is warranted. Also note that the 'charging' indicator lighting up is mostly a function of applied voltage and not so much of the current flowing, even a tiny bit of current would do the trick. I should measure with one of the phones here and a variable power supply what it takes to get that indicator to come on but I know it can't be much because a small solar cell will do it too. http://www.instructables.com/id/How-20-Make-a-Solar-Cell-Phone-Charger/ http://www.instructables.com/id/How-20-Make-a-Solar-Cell-Pho... (Conveniently does not mention how much current flows but that's right in the spirit of tfa.)
- tmh79 9y ago
  While I agree with you that this demo is suspect, I think your comment would be more useful if you backed it up with some of the physics/engineering principles that support your point of view.
dboreham 9y ago
This kind of technically unfeasible product scam is surprisingly common. When I worked for a large Internet company years ago they were looking at an investment in a start-up that claimed to transmit gigabits through high voltage long distance power transmission lines. No amount of citing Shannon and pointing out that said transmission lines are built with fiber lashed to the ground wire would dissuade them. And these were technically educated people.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  Huh? Where's the infeasibility there? I mean, PLC is already a reality, just at 220V instead of 100 kV range but that can be solved by inductively transmitting signals.
  - sathackr 9y ago
    We use coax, fiber, and twisted pairs to transmit signals for a reason -- the signal stays inside the cable(mostly) and other signals(interference) is kept out of the cable. The line voltage is not the limiting factor. To get gigabit speeds your need to transmit at RF frequencies, and that hundreds of miles-long power cable is one giant antenna that will interfere with other users of the spectrum. The power levels used in home powerline network gear are tiny, and the sources of interference much smaller. And even they have power and interference restrictions from the FCC to protect other users of the spectrum.
wonderous 9y ago
This looks more promising, "Demo of Short-Range Wireless Power Transfer": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13663193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13663193
adventurer 9y ago
Look at the pace at which the battery is charging on the smartphones. That's not even possible with a wired connection. If they're pumping that much energy through the air I imagine they would be dead already?
- lolc 9y ago
  In case you're not joking, that's a common "charging" animation in the video. The animation loops and its speed is unrelated to actual charging speed.
foxfired 9y ago
This reminds me a startup that was at techcrunch disrupt a few years ago. Cota[1] The tech seems to be the same whereas it tracks the position of the device then beams the power. Note however that Cota only sends one WATT of power per device. How much does UBeam sends? [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_joxrZ6vdYc&t=461s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_joxrZ6vdYc&t=461s
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Their claims are even more suspect than uBeam's.
Animats 9y ago
The picture shows a 32 x 32 array of small ultrasonic emitters. So that's 1024 emitters. The framed area is about 200mm square, so each emitter has a diameter of about 6mm. That's unusually small; typical diameters are 9mm to 20mm. I haven't been able to find the source of that transducer, but a similar one 9mm across is here.[1] That one can deliver 112dB sound pressure at 30cm range. 1000 of those would deliver 142dB at 40KHz. (10x = 10dB). If they're all wired to one amp, you get a straight beam. The demo indicates they're only getting a straight beam; steering the beam requires electronics behind each transducer. Quite possible, but runs up the cost. If they wire up the transducers in rings and drive them with slightly different phases, they can tighten up the beam focus. Since the receiver is smaller than the transmitter, focusing would help. Frequency is probably around 40KHz; if you go higher, losses in air go way up. I haven't worked out the drive power for this thing, but it's probably a few watts per transducer, or a few kilowatts for the whole array. So they have a 142dBA 40Khz beam about 200mm square. They ought to be able to do some short-range charging with it. Notes: * That's a high-powered ultrasonic beam. Is it hazardous? Most of the literature on ultrasonic safety involves energy coupled directly to skin, as with ultrasonic scanning, where there's a gel to improve transmission. Generating high energy in air is rarely done. It's certainly going to heat up anything in the beam. The safety issue is a big deal. All that energy has to go somewhere. * How far can they project this? At 40KHz, meters, maybe tens of meters.[2] Attenuation gets much worse with frequency, so this thing probably works in the low ultrasonic range. Early PR from UBeam talked about megahertz ultrasound, but the range would be a few millimeters up there. * Efficiency is terrible. Kilowatts in, watts out. * That array of transducers isn't cheap. Those things are usually a few dollars each. But in quantity, that could come down. So the demo they did, at under 1m range, is possible, but doesn't mean it's a useful technology. [1] https://www.americanpiezo.com/images/stories/content_images/pdf/apc_10-3005.pdf https://www.americanpiezo.com/images/stories/content_images/... [2] http://www.kayelaby.npl.co.uk/general_physics/2_4/2_4_1.html http://www.kayelaby.npl.co.uk/general_physics/2_4/2_4_1.html
- DannyBee 9y ago
  Note: they make a claim that explains why you can't find a source for the transducer: ""In five years, we have invented five completely novel ultrasonic transducers," she says. "They are the world's smallest, thinnest and most powerful and potentially least expensive transducers that exist. This may seem novel now, but our mission is to have charging become a passive experience. It will fade into the background.”"
chx 9y ago
This is so USA. Anti science and individualism at its best. Surely if someone wants a thing to happen and works hard enough it will happen. This is cornerstone of USA belief. That science says it can not happen has zero perhaps less than zero bearing on it: it's just those leftist, hippie, commie professors claiming shit to put down a hard working woman.
- paulddraper 9y ago
  How very scientific of you.
- sctb 9y ago
  Would you please not post such unsubstantive flamebait here? We're trying to have a conversation in which we stand to learn something and this never takes us there.
babyrainbow 9y ago
So what is new since the last demo?
TeMPOraL 9y ago
uBeam really must be the longest running joke in the history of SV. I don't wear a hat, but I'm going to buy one so I can eat it if it turns out they're not a scam after all.
userbinator 9y ago
On an electronics forum I lurk, there has been an ongoing discussion about uBeam ever since it began, and the general consensus is that it doesn't work: http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/the-ubeam-faq/ http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/the-ubeam-faq/ (There's more discussion about the recent developments in the last few posts.)
JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
It's amazing what this generation will go through to keep their dopamine dispenser (their phone) going at all times and available every second to them. No technology is too inefficient when dopamine is on the line. Kilowatts of ultrasonic beams aimed at your head to give your phone a trickle charge.
apozem 9y ago
> Perry says the sound waves generated by uBeam tech are safe, and the company will be "conducting third party tests to assure folks the technology is completely safe." And this is why I don't want uBeam doing the testing- they're certainly not going to go, "Welp, this technology has some negative health effects. Better return those venture bucks and shut down the company!" Any test they do is the scientific equivalent of "Man declares himself not guilty of fraud."
jondubois 9y ago
UBeam sounds like it should have been an university research project, not a startup. Even if the technology does work, is it actually useful and worth its cost?
- chrisallenlane 9y ago
  Yeah, I had the same impression. I'll concede that I probably use my phone less than a lot of people, but this looks like a "solution in search of a problem" to me. I'm still using a Nexus 5 that's several years old, and my battery rarely drops below 80% over the course of the day. (I only charge my phone when I sleep, and never "top it off" during the day.) When I do need to charge it, I plug it in, and can get a full charge in about an hour, if I remember correctly. Even if we were to assume that this product is viable technologically (which is a big "if"), my hunch is that it won't be viable commercially for much longer as advances in battery and phone technology make it irrelevant.
bastawhiz 9y ago
Is that an infrared camera mounted to the top of the unit? If so, it would seem like it's detecting the location with infrared and pointing some energy at it. What if the device is, say, in a pocket? All the pics also seem to show the charging sleeves with their backs pointed at the unit. If they can't work from other directions, that's a huge red flag.

76 points by daegloe 9y ago

The reporters didn't see a tear down of the sleeves, and wouldn't be able to identify a battery if they had. They showed sleeves and a charging indicator, rather than a simple wattmeter. This was a fraud—though like many inventors of perpetual motion machines, it is plausible Perry first fooled herself that the battery in the sleeve is just "to cover the initial surge" or "until we can fix this efficiency problem." The important lesson here is that USA Today and similar papers can be fooled by a rigged demo and a sincere voice. Read the front page with similar skepticism!

lern_too_spel 9y ago
It would require a lot of engineering work just to fake a demo to have a battery that charges when the sleeve is in the beam and doesn't when it isn't or the beam is blocked. More likely, there is actual power transmitted and received but not enough to charge the battery when the phone is doing anything at all. The charging indicator will turn on if you're putting 50 mW in, but that's not going to do much good when displaying the charging indicator uses more power than that.

jacquesm 9y ago

Umm, not to be really nasty but did they do a teardown of those sleeves? You can buy a new phone but if you slip it into a sleeve that size then that still affords plenty of room for a rigged demo. (Sorry, professional deformation at work here.) What would be far better proof that it works is a simple caloric setup showing how much power is transferred per unit time at which distances and angles from the transducer tile. Also, where do the optical lasers come in? To find a target to steer beams to using phased arrays of transducers? If so that would imply only line-of-sight. edit: so yes, the article confirms line of sight only and very low levels of power delivery

annerajb 9y ago
I guess that's why they want to make them as roof tiles to cover a whole room with multiples of there and have continuous coverage.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Two points: 1) interference 2) efficiency Lots of transmitters will interfere with each other, you'll get all kinds of interference patterns at the receiver which will negatively impact efficiency. And to that point, the second efficiency issue is that you will spend a ton of money to get a trickle of power to those phones, an inductive coupled system in the base of the table would deliver a large multiple because of the tighter coupling (decreased distance, fewer losses because of the medium chosen, electromagnetic coupling is well understood and efficient, acoustic coupling is fraught with all kinds of inefficiencies and hard to make work in a practical setup with useful levels of power).
jakob223 9y ago
Is there doubt that it works or that it is practical? I find it unlikely they went through this rigamarole with a case that was actually just a battery case, but this demo hasn't proven that the product will be widely useful as was claimed.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Well, if all it did was light up the 'charging' indicator without delivering meaningful power then yes, it is believable. But if they actually stand by their original claims then I'd open up that box to see what's in it because with the air density being what it is there is no way you're going to deliver that kind of power between two surfaces of the size shown in the article using ultrasound. You're going to get so much interference between the emissions of the various transducers that you'll end up with a very small fraction of the input power on the receiving side.
- jimrandomh 9y ago
  Yes, there is doubt about whether it works.

w1ntermute 9y ago

Analysis of the article by former uBeam VP of Engineering Paul Reynolds: > In all this time, have reporters still not learned to press on the key questions? "How much power is being received?", "How much is being sent?", "What's the efficiency?", "How much does it cost?", "Have you proved it safe?", and "If this is what you have now, what were all those 'prototypes' you were talking about 2 years ago?". But those are actual questions that matter, and basically we know the same today as we did yesterday (which indicates it was an awesome PR piece, lots of coverage with no actual info). http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/05/whats-in-picture.html http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/05/whats-in-pictur... http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/06/someone-was-paying-attention.html http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/06/someone-was-pay... http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/06/what-does-it-take-to-switch-phone.html http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/06/what-does-it-ta...

averagewall 9y ago
For safety, the transmitter could turn itself off if a receiver isn't receiving enough power. The receiver could radio back to the transmitter to identify its presence and power input.
- aisofteng 9y ago
  Have you considered sending the engineering team thoughts like these, or any other offhand ones?
  - logicallee 9y ago
    You were downvoted, and my interpretation is that people thought you were sarcastic and thought that this was an inappropriate jab, and downvoted for this reason. I think they're right that you're being sarcastic, due to the word "offhand". However, if we read your comment seriously (you are seriously stating it) then I actually agree with it: this means the "wrong" part of your comment is the /s (which you didn't include) and otherwise your comment is very solid. I'd like to defend it. Here are just some of the off-hand ideas that were demonstrated in this video: - Beam forming - Vision for device tracking. (VISION!!! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW OFF-HAND OF AN IDEA THIS IS?) - Inclusion built into every manufactured phone and uBeam beamers located all over the place, so that even a trickle ends up recharging the phone "throughout the course of a day" -- assuming you aren't actually using it. - Have it be something you don't even notice. (So that for this reason it doesn't matter if it barely works). ie if you have your phone in your pocket for an hour while you sit and talk to your friend, it goes from 51% to 83% charge. That is a good and viable definition of "don't even notice it." These are extremely off-hand ideas. It is extremely possible that adding a dozen other extremely off-hand ideas are all that it would take to make this a viable, pervasive technology, built into everything. For example, it was demonstrated on a huge receiver that is much larger than the phone it was attached to. A couple of off-hand ideas about how to make the receiver smaller might be all it takes to make this more interesting. There are further possible off-hand ideas. add in about a dozen and, if they have appropriate patents, they have a monopoly on a charging solution. When you have a choice of two cafes across the street, and if you spend an hour in one of them your battery will be 10% more charged than before you entered, would you choose that one over the other one? You would if you were at 1% battery level and waiting for an important client. Bam. You've just made a case that this brings free users to cafes as a direct competitive advantage, much like having wifi might. And what was this -- oh, right: an off-hand marketing idea I just had. Don't dismiss off-hand ideas. If you like, it's all Steve Jobs ever contributed. Send them - send them all. You might end up making uBeam work. Note: I have no association with the company or any horse in this game.

ogezi 9y ago

I was really skeptical about her company but the pictures in the article and the article itself seem legit. I wonder how they'll combat the inverse square law and make their technology actually feasible.

MichaelGG 9y ago
From this no details article, how can you determine that versus a small battery pack in the case?
- jclarkcom 9y ago
  I'm thinking about drones if it could work over longer distances, 24hr survailence
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    That's significantly more energy than they are able to transmit. Drones consume a lot of power.
trsohmers 9y ago
Not to be defending/advocating that uBeam's tech is actually any good, but the inverse square law refers to omnidirectional transmission, while uBeam's claims are related to directional transmission of power.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Have you ever seen an audio frequency transducer (say up to 200 KHz) that delivered an actual beam? Usually the inverse square law is very much in effect when it comes to audio, this is because the medium (waves in air) behaves as water does with waves do in a pond rather than say the light coming out of a laser or any other focused source of electromagnetic radiation. Distance from the transmitter will very much be a factor.
  - 9y ago

samfisher83 9y ago

Transmitting energy through the air is going to be inherently less efficient than wires. It looks like you will have to have a direct line of sight. Wireless energy transmission Bankrupted Tesla and he had a lot money back then, and he was one of the smartest people ever. 26 Million dollars seems like a lot of money to put into a project like this when physics would seem to dictate it isn't going to work.

rhinoceraptor 9y ago
It could still be useful if it could charge your phone/laptop all the time without you needing to worry about or manage it. And in that case it doesn't need to be as efficient as a wire since it can start charging as soon as you get home until you leave.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > It could still be useful if it could charge your phone/laptop all the time without you needing to worry about or manage it. And without you using it. As soon as you start using it you'll be back to normal, and likely there would not be enough power to put a meaningful charge into anything the size of a laptop with this system. Unless phones are going to use a small fraction of the power they use today I don't see this working in practical setups. > And in that case it doesn't need to be as efficient as a wire since it can start charging as soon as you get home until you leave. 10 seconds plugged in to a wire would give you more juice than an hour or two hooked up to those transducer arrays.
  - dsr_ 9y ago
    Nobody has yet mentioned, perhaps because it's obvious: every time you change the density of the medium in the path of the sound beam, you get reflection or refraction losses. Hands are much denser than air. Not only does UBeam need to track where the receiver is, they need to hit the target without going through your hand or body to avoid another large efficiency loss -- I believe the typical figure for air/soft tissue boundaries is 99%.
9y ago

monk_e_boy 9y ago

"Your phone could be at 1% charged all day." Wow, phones are something like 60% battery at the moment. Imagine cutting that in half?! Phones could become much more powerful.

jimrandomh 9y ago

This is fake. They got some gullible reporters to plug their phones into black boxes, which are supposedly receiving power. In reality, those boxes contain sensors to tell them when to pretend to receive power, plus batteries. If it were real, they would've given the demo to someone with technical sophistication. They wouldn'tve bothered taking a trip to a phone store, since all the observers already had their own phones. And, also, the laws of physics would be slightly different. But this scam isn't aimed at us. It's aimed at investors, who will never read this Hacker News thread, or any other thread where smart people are around to debunk it. Because if they did read that sort of thing, they wouldn't be an investor.

icelancer 9y ago
This is not fake. It is real. It is, however, put on display in a such a way that masks all the very real limitations on such technology. The sensors + batteries in the box is an absurd claim.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > The sensors + batteries in the box is an absurd claim. No more absurd than that uBeam will deliver meaningful power using ultrasound. So if they are going to show a demo that does what they claimed originally then the contents of the box would definitely be subject to scrutiny. I've had a really nice rigged demo tried on me during a tech DD once and that tech was a lot more believable than what is on display here so some skepticism is warranted. Also note that the 'charging' indicator lighting up is mostly a function of applied voltage and not so much of the current flowing, even a tiny bit of current would do the trick. I should measure with one of the phones here and a variable power supply what it takes to get that indicator to come on but I know it can't be much because a small solar cell will do it too. http://www.instructables.com/id/How-20-Make-a-Solar-Cell-Phone-Charger/ http://www.instructables.com/id/How-20-Make-a-Solar-Cell-Pho... (Conveniently does not mention how much current flows but that's right in the spirit of tfa.)
tmh79 9y ago
While I agree with you that this demo is suspect, I think your comment would be more useful if you backed it up with some of the physics/engineering principles that support your point of view.

dboreham 9y ago

This kind of technically unfeasible product scam is surprisingly common. When I worked for a large Internet company years ago they were looking at an investment in a start-up that claimed to transmit gigabits through high voltage long distance power transmission lines. No amount of citing Shannon and pointing out that said transmission lines are built with fiber lashed to the ground wire would dissuade them. And these were technically educated people.

mschuster91 9y ago
Huh? Where's the infeasibility there? I mean, PLC is already a reality, just at 220V instead of 100 kV range but that can be solved by inductively transmitting signals.
- sathackr 9y ago
  We use coax, fiber, and twisted pairs to transmit signals for a reason -- the signal stays inside the cable(mostly) and other signals(interference) is kept out of the cable. The line voltage is not the limiting factor. To get gigabit speeds your need to transmit at RF frequencies, and that hundreds of miles-long power cable is one giant antenna that will interfere with other users of the spectrum. The power levels used in home powerline network gear are tiny, and the sources of interference much smaller. And even they have power and interference restrictions from the FCC to protect other users of the spectrum.

wonderous 9y ago

This looks more promising, "Demo of Short-Range Wireless Power Transfer": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13663193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13663193

adventurer 9y ago

Look at the pace at which the battery is charging on the smartphones. That's not even possible with a wired connection. If they're pumping that much energy through the air I imagine they would be dead already?

lolc 9y ago
In case you're not joking, that's a common "charging" animation in the video. The animation loops and its speed is unrelated to actual charging speed.

foxfired 9y ago

This reminds me a startup that was at techcrunch disrupt a few years ago. Cota[1] The tech seems to be the same whereas it tracks the position of the device then beams the power. Note however that Cota only sends one WATT of power per device. How much does UBeam sends? [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_joxrZ6vdYc&t=461s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_joxrZ6vdYc&t=461s

jacquesm 9y ago
Their claims are even more suspect than uBeam's.

Animats 9y ago

The picture shows a 32 x 32 array of small ultrasonic emitters. So that's 1024 emitters. The framed area is about 200mm square, so each emitter has a diameter of about 6mm. That's unusually small; typical diameters are 9mm to 20mm. I haven't been able to find the source of that transducer, but a similar one 9mm across is here.[1] That one can deliver 112dB sound pressure at 30cm range. 1000 of those would deliver 142dB at 40KHz. (10x = 10dB). If they're all wired to one amp, you get a straight beam. The demo indicates they're only getting a straight beam; steering the beam requires electronics behind each transducer. Quite possible, but runs up the cost. If they wire up the transducers in rings and drive them with slightly different phases, they can tighten up the beam focus. Since the receiver is smaller than the transmitter, focusing would help. Frequency is probably around 40KHz; if you go higher, losses in air go way up. I haven't worked out the drive power for this thing, but it's probably a few watts per transducer, or a few kilowatts for the whole array. So they have a 142dBA 40Khz beam about 200mm square. They ought to be able to do some short-range charging with it. Notes: * That's a high-powered ultrasonic beam. Is it hazardous? Most of the literature on ultrasonic safety involves energy coupled directly to skin, as with ultrasonic scanning, where there's a gel to improve transmission. Generating high energy in air is rarely done. It's certainly going to heat up anything in the beam. The safety issue is a big deal. All that energy has to go somewhere. * How far can they project this? At 40KHz, meters, maybe tens of meters.[2] Attenuation gets much worse with frequency, so this thing probably works in the low ultrasonic range. Early PR from UBeam talked about megahertz ultrasound, but the range would be a few millimeters up there. * Efficiency is terrible. Kilowatts in, watts out. * That array of transducers isn't cheap. Those things are usually a few dollars each. But in quantity, that could come down. So the demo they did, at under 1m range, is possible, but doesn't mean it's a useful technology. [1] https://www.americanpiezo.com/images/stories/content_images/pdf/apc_10-3005.pdf https://www.americanpiezo.com/images/stories/content_images/... [2] http://www.kayelaby.npl.co.uk/general_physics/2_4/2_4_1.html http://www.kayelaby.npl.co.uk/general_physics/2_4/2_4_1.html

DannyBee 9y ago
Note: they make a claim that explains why you can't find a source for the transducer: ""In five years, we have invented five completely novel ultrasonic transducers," she says. "They are the world's smallest, thinnest and most powerful and potentially least expensive transducers that exist. This may seem novel now, but our mission is to have charging become a passive experience. It will fade into the background.”"

chx 9y ago

This is so USA. Anti science and individualism at its best. Surely if someone wants a thing to happen and works hard enough it will happen. This is cornerstone of USA belief. That science says it can not happen has zero perhaps less than zero bearing on it: it's just those leftist, hippie, commie professors claiming shit to put down a hard working woman.

paulddraper 9y ago
How very scientific of you.
sctb 9y ago
Would you please not post such unsubstantive flamebait here? We're trying to have a conversation in which we stand to learn something and this never takes us there.

babyrainbow 9y ago

So what is new since the last demo?

TeMPOraL 9y ago

uBeam really must be the longest running joke in the history of SV. I don't wear a hat, but I'm going to buy one so I can eat it if it turns out they're not a scam after all.

userbinator 9y ago

On an electronics forum I lurk, there has been an ongoing discussion about uBeam ever since it began, and the general consensus is that it doesn't work: http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/the-ubeam-faq/ http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/the-ubeam-faq/ (There's more discussion about the recent developments in the last few posts.)

JohnJamesRambo 9y ago

It's amazing what this generation will go through to keep their dopamine dispenser (their phone) going at all times and available every second to them. No technology is too inefficient when dopamine is on the line. Kilowatts of ultrasonic beams aimed at your head to give your phone a trickle charge.

apozem 9y ago

> Perry says the sound waves generated by uBeam tech are safe, and the company will be "conducting third party tests to assure folks the technology is completely safe." And this is why I don't want uBeam doing the testing- they're certainly not going to go, "Welp, this technology has some negative health effects. Better return those venture bucks and shut down the company!" Any test they do is the scientific equivalent of "Man declares himself not guilty of fraud."

jondubois 9y ago

UBeam sounds like it should have been an university research project, not a startup. Even if the technology does work, is it actually useful and worth its cost?

chrisallenlane 9y ago
Yeah, I had the same impression. I'll concede that I probably use my phone less than a lot of people, but this looks like a "solution in search of a problem" to me. I'm still using a Nexus 5 that's several years old, and my battery rarely drops below 80% over the course of the day. (I only charge my phone when I sleep, and never "top it off" during the day.) When I do need to charge it, I plug it in, and can get a full charge in about an hour, if I remember correctly. Even if we were to assume that this product is viable technologically (which is a big "if"), my hunch is that it won't be viable commercially for much longer as advances in battery and phone technology make it irrelevant.

bastawhiz 9y ago

Is that an infrared camera mounted to the top of the unit? If so, it would seem like it's detecting the location with infrared and pointing some energy at it. What if the device is, say, in a pocket? All the pics also seem to show the charging sleeves with their backs pointed at the unit. If they can't work from other directions, that's a huge red flag.