Do you like to dance? Do you like to save energy to help the environment? Now you can dance until your hearts content and save the planet at the same time! A new kinect dance floor generates energy as people dance and then uses that power to create electricity.
The kinect dance floor was created by a company in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The kinect floor uses individual tiles with small built in generators to collect and store energy which is used to power nearby systems or LED lights located on the dance floor.
The floor drops 10mm when stepped on, and that small compression is enough to activate an internal generator that products 35 wats of sustained output per module.
The company sells and rents the floors, which the company says has already generated nearly 8 billion joules.
According to Project Frog CEO Ann Hand:
“A few years ago most people didn’t even realize that nearly 40% of the carbon emissions were from the building environment. Everyone focuses so much on transportation and cars they don’t even look at our buildings as the biggest contributors. Now there’s a real appetite for it, and there’s so much inefficiency in the build environment. You don’t have to give up anything to have a better building to occupy.”
While the kinect dance floor may not be the answer to solving our climate change problems the technology could be used to create new closed-loop recycling systems which allow for simple returns on resources.
Could you imagine if the steps we took on city streets could generate the electricity we use in our homes and businesses?