Powered by movement

Wouldn’t it be cool if when you stepped into a room, music would start to play? Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to charge your MP3 player? Researchers at the University of Southampton are currently working on generating energy in a way that will make these scenarios quite possible.

Dr Steve Beeby was awarded the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Leadership Fellowship to take on this project with his Southampton team. Using rapid printing processes and active printing inks, they will be able to harvest energy in the form of film, from textiles.

This means that the film could be put on clothes, or on a carpet. So people would actually have the power to create energy just by walking around their home or office.

The research will begin in October and will continue until 2015. So in just half a decade, the world may be walking to their music and wearing energy on their sleeves.