Four undergraduate students at UC Berkeley created a rocking chair called the Volta that stores kinetic energy from an attached pendulum.
At first, the team thought such a chair would be a novelty, a student project that had rocking chair users see how much energy they could generate from rocking back and forth.
Of course, once chair sitters interacted with the smartphone app that tracked the energy they were producing, they wanted a USB port to keep their iPhone charged up.
“Ultimately what ended up happening was people would keep saying, ‘Hey, where’s the plug to charge my phone?’” said team member Jessica Chiu in a press release.
Sadly, you won’t be able to run into your local furniture store and pick up an iChair. The team has no plans to market the 80 pound rocking chair, though we’d surely check it out if it had a cup holder.
This isn’t the first attempt at an electricity-producing chair, interestingly. The Murikami Rocking chair powered a light bulb, the Empower chair was slated to hit airports around the world, and the iRock, which got some press in 2012, had little speakers to actually rock. None of these really made it to market, either.
Don’t be surprised, though, to see something like this on Kickstarter soon. I’d surely be glad to charge my iPhone while I work; just keep those damn kids off my lawn.
Source: PopSci
Via: Yahoo Tech
