With over a decades’ worth of perseverance, physicist Hatem Zeine might have found a way to recharge a mobile device completely wirelessly – without coming into any physical contact with a charging base. The Cota by Ossia is a breakthrough technology that can transmit wireless power for industrial usage, as well as consumer applications.
After debuting the Cota wireless charging prototype and revealing his company Ossia for the first time at Disrupt, Zeine is confident that his wireless power technology will change the way power is transferred. Devices that are Cota-enabled can receive power within a 10 foot radius. The device employs the same frequencies used by Wifi and Bluetooth to send magnetic charges to designated devices or hotspots.
During his presentation, Zeine was able to remotely charge an iPhone 5 with one of his prototype wireless transmitters. Zeine believes the Cota is “the only wireless power technology that can deliver one watt of power at a distance of 30ft safely.”
Cota is an illuminated monolithic cylinder that charges devices wirelessly. The Bellevue, Washington-based company Ossia built the device, and Digital Trends profiled the company’s founder, Hatem Zeine, in November of last year. The concept’s a simple but tantalizing one: You flip on the Cota, place the compatible device you’d like to charge within range, and, like magic, it begins to recharge. If you’ve ever imagined a future free of charging pads and wall chargers, the Cota’s the product you’ve been waiting for.
The technology behind it is anything but simple, however. The Cota’s filled with hundreds of omnidirectional antennas that beam radio (RF) waves over 2.8GHz at 100 Hz, well beyond the interference range of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Anas Alfarra, Ossia’s intellectual property chief, told me its next-generation model contains four times as many transmitters as the current one.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, they lie dormant most of the time — the key that triggers the Cota’s wireless power delivery is Ossia’s proprietary transceiver. When a device requires a recharge, the transceiver sends a packet of information to the Cota that includes its current power level. The Cota then directs the needed power to the transceiver’s relative location, or to multiple transceivers’ locations. Alfarra said the team has successfully charged as many as 32 devices simultaneously.