Forget Solar, Laptops Powered By Typing Are On Their Way

Would you embed an electrical circuit in your hands in order to power your laptop from your body's own energy?

Yeah, neither would I (not did the guy in the picture...he just had a Sharpie and got bored), but laptops could soon be powered by the very tapping of your fingers on the keyboard.

Mashable says,

Australian researchers have figured out a way to harness the energy we use while typing to power a laptop. Using piezoelectricity, this method works in a similar way to cigarette lighters that create a spark by striking a piezoelectric crystal.

To power a laptop, though, a much thinner film of the piezoelectric material would have to be developed using nanotechnology. It’s so thin, it can be coated onto various electronic parts and integrated into a variety of gadgetry.

When I first started reading the post on Mashable (which is referencing a scientific study that was then picked up by GizMag), I thought the study would be about harnessing the kinetic energy of the key motion itself. In fact, I had never heard of piezoelectricity before then.

Using piezoelectric film to generate the energy under the keyboard seems like a much better solution than plain old kinetic energy. Why? Because the development of such a method could then be built out to power lots of other devices by the same technology. Think about all of the devices you interact heavily with via touch...iPod, phone, etc.

Oh sure, we have plenty of nifty solar-powered computer peripherals, like this sweet solar keyboard, but powering an entire laptop by solar power is an entirely different thing. Powering a laptop by the key presses seems like a much more feasible method than solar...in both the long and short runs.

What do you think about a typing powered laptop? If it did happen, I guess that means my much more comfy external keyboard on which I'm typing this right now would be eradicated.

Hmmm....