Make Your Own Energy With mPower Concept

Bored at home? Why not make your own energy with Sofian Tallal’s mPower. It’s as simple as stepping onto the two leaf-shaped pads, pressing the fingerprint detector and shifting your weight from one pad to the other every 10 seconds. Hydraulic cylinders beneath each pad pass fluid back and forth with each step, generating power through a micro-hydro turbine. To keep you occupied, an interactive touch screen takes a bit of the power to browse the Internet, play games, listen to music and view advertisements — which help offset the cost of the device. Energy is then sold to the electric company. Tallal suggests that the mPower could even be provided to the homeless as a source or revenue. Typically, we’d like to see some numbers associated with such a fanciful idea — something to the effect of “‘X’ minutes of use can power your computer for ‘y’ minutes” — but this is just a concept, so we’ll let it slide. [Sofian Tallal via Tuvie]