Wireless power

A few years ago we saw a demonstration by a team at Fulton Innovation of a product called eCoupled. Using the principle of electromagnetic induction, by which an electrical charge can be stimulated in a wire coil by placing another one nearby, the crazy boffins were able to display wireless power transfer.


Despite being high voltage, they said, it was safe, efficient and could be applied to any surface. The demo room consisted of a kitchen without plugs, but full of lights that could be stuck anywhere and a frying pan that heated up just by sitting it on the counter. Put a phone on the same counter and it began charging. Clearly, this was the future.

Fulton are still working on wireless power, but it's a different company that's beat it to the shops, Powermat – and its products are expensive for something that replaces a 50p mains plug.


The good news is that the Wireless Power Consortium are going to be finalising a standard for wireless power called Qi later this year, which should mean prices drop and manufacturers have the confidence to build the technology straight into devices, rather than requiring an adaptor.


If you think that's crazy, though, take a look at Airnergy by RCA. It's a tiny dongle that can turn Wi-Fi signals back into electricity for charging phone batteries and the like.

OLED displays

Yeah, we hear you. Another year, another promise that OLED screens are going to take over. Haven't we heard it all before? Except this time it could be true.

Google's Nexus phone has just launched with an OLED screen, and by all accounts it makes the handset almost – say it in hushed tones – more desirable than the iPhone. Brighter colours, sharper resolutions, darker blacks, whiter whites; why is this OLED technology so superior?

Put simply, it's because instead of filtering the light from a white or blue lamp behind the screen, each pixel in an OLED panel produces its own light. You don't have to be an optometrist to see why this is better, but it is much more expensive to produce.

Still, it also means OLED screens are much thinner than backlit ones, for obvious reasons, and while you may not be using an OLED PC monitor by the end of the year there are a lot more laptops with the technology arriving.

Natural user interface

In his CES keynote presentation, Steve Ballmer made several references to the 'Natural User Interface' (NUI), which is a handy catch all to describe all the Wii wand-waving, multitouch point and Project
Natal-style aerobics that are catching headlines out there.

The keyboard and mouse is by no means dead, but the sudden flood of cheap laptops and all-in-ones with a built-in, multitouch screen suggests that it won't be long before we'll all have something a little bit different on our desktops.

Over in the US, for example, custom laptop maker IBuyPower has already started selling high-end gaming notebooks with a multitouch screen, and French developer, Eugen Systems has incorporated Win7's multitouch controls into the heart of its forthcoming strategy title R.U.S.E. It's all very exciting, except for one thing.


Multitouch may be native to Win7 and no other operating system, but the implementation is nowhere near as smooth as it is on, say, the iPhone. PCFormat has yet to use a multitouch application on a PC that doesn't suffer from a bit of inaccuracy or sluggishness, and the key to the NUI is in the first word. It has to feel natural, unforced and invisible to the end user. That's what using multitouch on an iPhone is like, and that's what Windows must achieve. If the mouse remains faster and more trusted, that's what people will use.


There are some brilliant ideas out there, though. Project Natal, Microsoft's full body 3D gesture recognition system for Xbox 360, is by far the most ambitious prototype, and we can't wait for a PC hack.
At CES the prototype Light Touch projector, from Light Blue Optics (lightblueoptics.com), was a show stealer. Using a technique called holographic laser projection, this tiny projector turns any 10inch surface – flat or curved - into a sharp multitouch screen.