“Today, a huge amount of energy is wasted on heating empty offices, homes, and partially occupied buildings,” said professor Carlo Ratti, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Senseable City Lab, which led the project. “The technologies underlying Local Warming could address this by synchronizing climate control with human presence, vastly improving the energy efficiency of buildings,” Ratti said.
As a visitor enters a room, the person’s location and trajectory are spotted using a new WiFi-based location tracking technology developed by professor Dina Katabi and her team in the MIT Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing, housed in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. This information is then transmitted in real time to an array of dynamic heating elements positioned in a grid near the ceiling.
Each element is composed of a servo-motor that changes direction, a bulb to generate infrared radiation, a cold mirror and other optics to create focused beams.
