Game on with this battery-free device
IMAGINE having a handheld gaming device that can be powered by solar energy, and your own actions, with no other battery required.
Researchers at Northwestern University in the US and the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands are developing Engage, an energy aware gaming platform that both harnesses solar power and converts user actions into energy, in the quest to bring intermittent computing and sustainable technology to more mainstream applications like video games.
Josiah Hester, the co-leader of the research, claimed it’s the first battery-free interactive device that harvests energy from users’ actions.
“When you press a button, the button converts that energy into something that powers your gaming,” Hester said in an article published by Northwestern University.
“Sustainable gaming will become a reality, and we made a major step in that direction – by getting rid of the battery completely,” added TU Delft’s Przemyslaw Pawelczak, who co-led the research with Hester.
To test their sustainable gaming technology, the researchers built a clone of the original 8-bit Nintendo Game Boy with solar panels attached to the front of the chassis or body. Button mashing by the user will be the secondary source of energy.
“We’re using capacitors which are basically two metal plates. Batteries are (typically) chemical factories where the chemicals will break down eventually or degrade until they create this slow voltage that is no longer usable.
“Whereas with the capacitor, you can continuously recharge it millions and millions of times,” Hester said in a Youtube video introducing the Engage platform.
With solar power, poor lighting conditions can negatively affect gameplay as well as immersion since the device doesn’t emit sound, said researchers.
As for the gaming experience, a user may get up to 10 seconds of gameplay before the device runs out of power and shuts down. On the plus side, it can be immediately powered back up again after a few button mashings, with the article stating that gameplay interruptions typically last for less than a second – a process that researchers cite as one example of intermittent computing.
Researchers said this is a playable scenario for games like Chess, Solitaire and Tetris but not yet for all action games.
The team also claimed to have developed a new technique of storing the system state in
“non-volatile memory” and that users can continue gameplay from the exact point where the device lost power, even if it is “mid-jump in a platform game such as Super Mario Land”, according to the article.
“With our platform, we want to make a statement that it is possible to make a sustainable gaming system that bring fun and joy to the users,” Pawelczak said.
Researchers stated that one of their main aims in developing this platform was to further reduce society’s dependence on batteries, which are costly and environmentally hazardous. When not recycled properly, batteries with lead components may have dangerous health impacts, according to an article by Forbes. The low recycling rate for lithium ion batteries also meant that the waste often end up in landfills.