Considering the fascination we’ve seen from our readers with the Levitron, we figured we should get in on the ground floor to show you a few projects experimenting with the levitating light bulb. (We’ve actually found a lot of levitating stuff.) You read that right: there are guys out there who are working on floating your light sources without support and powering them without wires. The possibilities for this technology seem like they could be endless, and how cool would your ultra sleek minimalist man cave look with gently bobbing stainless steel fixtures? This isn’t an optical illusion or a pipe dream. Check after the jump for a couple of super neat videos.
Levitating Light Bulb – It’s All Good Until We Have To Use An Electo Magnetic Pulse Against The Machines
Transferring power wirelessly is actually nothing all that new; Tesla had a go at it in the 1890s. However, there’s something about combining levitation with wireless power AND the ability to shed light, and suddenly this idea gets pushed to the limit of cool. While right now, a lot of tweaking will be needed to figure out the best way to increase the weight of the light while maximizing power transfer, in the future I look forward to epic hallways filled with stretches of these. I can picture large echoing rooms filled with floating light orbs, and it’s a beautiful and surreal image- that is, until you think that if the power goes out, or some weird electro magnetic interference occurs, it will probably drop dozens of the levitating light bulb down in the form of a glass bomb just waiting to shatter on your face. Would we need safety nets under all our lighting? You’d think that aesthetically, that would be worse than wires, but it would probably be better than cracked skulls. Plus, there’s that whole magnetic fields and cancer thing, that so many people seem to think is going to jump out of fridge magnets and phones and immediately murder everyone within a 10 foot radius. You’d probably get an entire subset of the population who would refuse to enter the room under the hoodoo lights, and would glare angrily through windows from under the mysterious shadows of their tinfoil caps.
The first levitating light bulb I found is a permanent installation that serves as more art than function, as the illumination flickers and isn’t very intense. However, I can appreciate the amount of time that went into disguising the system so everything looks magical.
This second experiment is one that I hope is developed on in the future- it’s very small scale now (and not as polished), but the light is bright and steady, and it’s a design that could probably be scaled up in a number of applications. You can read all about the process at the creator’s site.
As much as I’m sarcastic about a lot of the possibilities experiments like this create, I really do think this would be an awesome step to take in the future. In kitchens under cupboards, over a bar, above the dining room table or over the bed- can you imagine reaching up and being able to move a floating light source from place to place as you wanted to? The future is looking pretty awesome, even if it is full of magnets and cancer.
