By Andrew Liszewski
When attending a massive music and arts festival, the last thing you want happening is your mobile phone dying so you miss out on distractions like email, Facebook and Twitter. So once again Orange has cooked up another concept device to be tested at this year’s Glastonbury festival of contemporary arts that lets you recharge your electronics without having access to an outlet. In the past they’ve created devices like the Power Pump and Power Wellies, but this year it’s a t-shirt that will theoretically be providing power to future concert goers.
To be specific, it’s actually a piezoelectric film panel on the front of the t-shirt that generates the power. About the size of a piece of A4 paper, it works like a large microphone, absorbing sound waves and converting them into an electrical charge via interlaced quartz crystals that is then stored in a separate battery. As long as sound levels stay around 80dB, the Sound Charge shirt should produce about 6 W/h of power over the weekend, which is roughly enough to recharge two old-school cellphones, or a single modern smartphone. Not exactly the most efficient solution out there, but it’s certainly eco-friendly.
[ PR – Orange – Turn it up to 11… Orange unveils the ‘Sound Charge’ 2011 ] VIA [ Electricpig ]
