Wireless power transmission has taken another step towards commercial reality.

At its eighth annual Research@Intel event on Thursday in Mountain View, California, the chip giant gave a crowd-gathering demo of what it calls a Wireless Resonant Energy Link (WREL).

The demo setup included a hefty transmitter and receive-coil pair in which the receive coil had at its center a small speaker, with both the audio signal and the power required to drive the speaker being transmitted wirelessly.

The WREL, as its name implies, transmits power by setting up a resonant relationship between the transmitter and the receive coil, much as does the battery recharger in your wireless electric toothbrush.

However, as Intel researcher Emily Cooper told The Reg, the WREL's power transmission is "very different from the electric toothbrush charger [power] that falls off after about a millimeter."

Although the demo was transmitting only about one or two watts at a distance of over a meter, Cooper claimed that in Intel's Seattle lab, they've managed to power a netbook at distances of between one and two meters, providing between 14 and 20 watts. She also said that lab tests had powered 40 and 60-watt light bulbs.

So we got our answer: won't be commercialized soon.

It's still a awesome idea, which came from an awesome guy, Nikola Tesla.

Yes, it is awesome.

Wow Its nice to think about how we are moving forward into the future But would any kind of sensation be felt by passing through this electric transmission? probably not if the current is constant and low enough but I wonder if this kind of technology has some kind of disrupting disadvantage.

Old as hell. One famous scientist developed the same system before ww2 but it was never used because there was no way for the power company to keep track of the amount of electricity you were using.

Yeah that guy.