Ripe TV

At MIT’s school of Architecture and Planning, two geniuses came up with a great idea that is somehow creepy in a “Matrix” way. It’s called the Crowd Farm.

It would work by rebuilding places with a lot of foot traffic by installing squishy ground. When people stepped on whatever squishy material was used, it would move down. The energy would be absorbed through a dynamo and stored as electricity.

The electric current generated by the Crowd Farm could then be used for educational purposes, such as lighting up a sign about energy. "We want people to understand the direct relationship between their movement and the energy produced," says Jusczyk.

The Crowd Farm is not intended for home use. According to Graham and Jusczyk, a single human step can only power two 60W light bulbs for one flickering second. But get a crowd in motion, multiply that single step by 28,527 steps, for example, and the result is enough energy to power a moving train for one second.

Is it a sad commentary or a sign of genius that the first thing we came up with was a self-powered Dance Dance Revolution machine?