Hydroelectric Shoes That Power Your iPod

A Chinese company has engineered a pair of shoes that generates electricity as you walk. The sole contains a small amount of water and when the walker takes a step the fluid shifts and spins a tiny turbine capable of creating 1.2 watts of electricity. It's just enough to keep an iPod running forever provided the user keeps walking.

They're working on ways to make it more efficient and powerful and say the shoes could generate as much as 3 watts, which would handle a laptop. Unfortunately there's no system right now to store power so you'd have to be walking while using that laptop, which means you would have no lap, and therefore no top of your lap. But putting a small battery on a belt or on whatever connector goes into the device could solve that problem.

NTT hopes to actually have products for sale with the generators in 2010.

Source