This is a battery free Game Boy. If you open this up, there's nothing
that you would recognize as a battery in your phone or a double A that you've replaced back
in the old days with the original Game Boy. There's no need to ever plug this into the
wall. This looks like your classic old school Game Boy, but
really this is the beginning of this movement of these smart devices towards a sustainable
future of computing and the internet of things.
This is Engage, a battery-free Game Boy lookalike
that can play all the classics -- from Super Mario to Tetris to Space Invaders. While the
device looks and plays like a Game Boy, it’s really something revolutionary.
The Engage platform is completely separate in terms of hardware from an actual Game Boy.
It's a different screen, different computer, different microprocessor, different buttons.
We completely redesigned from scratch even to the 3D housing, which we modeled it
closely after the Game Boy to give that nostalgic feel. The biggest difference is that Engage
harvests energy from the environment using a process called INTERMITTENT COMPUTING.
The Engage device harvests energy from these solar panels and these mechanical buttons.
So the buttons have these magnets that are pushed through coils. They change the magnetic
field and we harvest that change. That’s right -- playing the console actually powers
the console! The frequency of your button mashing will determine how much energy you
actually have. Then the solar panels are also gathering energy and eventually it all flows
into this processor, which lets us actually play Game Boy games, so you have unlimited
energy that you can gather from the environment, but you only have this trickle that is hard
to predict and is very dynamic. That intermittent power translates to a different type of game
play than what you might be used to. It harvests just enough energy to turn on, then it does
a little bit of computation, and then it dies. And I'm pressing
buttons fairly consistently like this, turning my tetromino blocks, we'll get like 10 seconds
of the screen on and then it might turn off. Then it turns back on.
The Engage platform
is actually saving almost a screenshot or a "save game" of exactly where I'm at when
I stopped playing or when I run out of energy. The internal workings of the device will actually
save the memory, really, really quickly to what's called F-RAM, this non-volatile memory
that persists through the power failure. And then when I go back and I'm playing the game, it'll go back
to that exact same place so that I don't lose any progress.
This is the beginning of a new era. Right now we have interruptions, but the key thing
here is that time, that interruption amount is going to continually decrease as we make
these systems better and better and more energy efficient. Sustainability and energy efficiency
are at the heart of this project. Engage is really a way to encourage people to
rethink all of their assumptions about what computing is and where the energy for computing
comes from. That was really our goal. Because it's becoming increasingly impossible to ignore
the effects of global heating and climate change. And as that continues to happen, we
will start seeking out these different ways to focus on renewables, reduce our footprints
and build devices that would be more sustainable. And it’s also hard to ignore that there
are more connected devices on the planet than ever. In fact, there are actually more cell
phones than there are people on Earth! And the number of connected devices is estimated
to hit A TRILLION in the next couple of decades! Now, it may seem pretty obvious -- but this
could be really bad for our environment. Researchers and tech journalists recently suggested that
the assembly of 100 million Playstation 4’s sold in the last decade generated approximately
9.8 million tons of CO2. That’s more CO2 emitted than what countries like El Salvador
and Iceland produce annually! Other 21st century tech -- like smartphones, wearables,
and electric cars also impact the environment in their production. And what’s turning
out to be really problematic -- they use lithium-ion batteries. The actual act of extraction itself
is incredibly difficult and damaging. It takes a huge amount of water, generally
fresh water to extract lithium from the Earth. And what's worse is that the main places that
you actually get lithium are in lands that unfortunately are already experiencing
water scarcity. But the problem with lithium-ion batteries isn’t just in their manufacturing.
At some point, the battery’s thrown out. We're already experiencing a
huge backlog in terms of being able to recycle this. There are just mountains of E-waste across
the world that we're not able to deal with. This imminent need to reduce electronic waste
is one of the driving forces behind Josiah’s work in building a sustainable gaming console.
But Josiah’s main motivation is rooted in his Native Hawaiian heritage. There's a indigenous
backdrop to all of this, and that is this concept of seventh generation decision-making
or seven generation sustainability. This idea of, I'm going to make decisions right now and maybe practices
that will benefit the many generations in front of me. The Engage embodies this long-term
approach to innovation. This is a proof by demonstration that sustainable gaming and
even smart devices can actually be built. We don't have to rely on this traditional
old school idea of using batteries and these non-renewable sources to power our smart devices.
We need to rethink now what we're doing so that the many generations in front of me
will be the beneficiary of these redesigns of how we do computation. It also helps that
-- like so many of us -- Josiah grew up gaming. Nostalgia and attachment,
to these devices like the Game Boy that really speak to something right deep
down that we want to inspire that feeling in people so they can connect this treasured
device that they've used, to sustainability and the rethinking of what
computing means as we're going forward in the next decade. Because this innovation isn’t
just going to change the world of gaming. It could radically change our world as we
know it. You have everything from wearables, think of a battery-free Fitbit or smartwatch,
to implantable devices that can help give different types of therapeutics or information about you to things
that are shot into space that can measure the Earth's magnetosphere. This could go beyond
these types of devices that are for fun and joy, although we all need some joy. But really Engage
is trying to say, rethink, redesign, inspire radical creative approaches to addressing
e-waste and more broadly in mitigating the effects of climate change in all of society.
Remember, the next time someone questions your gaming the game you’re playing could
inspire you to make the next great technological leap forward. My mom called me; she saw the
Wall Street Journal article about the Game Boy. And she was like, "Wow, I guess, having
that Game Boy when you were eight actually turned out to be something like you said it
would." And I was like, "Told you. Gaming paid off, mom, after all this time.