Steorn reveals Orbo today

According to the front page of Steorn’s site:

View the online demonstration here at 6pm Eastern Time (ET).

The Irish Times is carrying an article about the demonstration. Excerpt below:

While 22 scientists continue their exhaustive tests on the Orbo technology the inventors are asking the public to come and see a demonstration for themselves at Kinetica Museum, Spitalfields Market, London.

A live working demonstration will be streamed on the internet from 6pm tonight. It can be viewed on the web from four different camera angles, before opening to visitors on Thursday.

Sean McCarthy, chief executive of Steorn, said: “What we are showing basically is a very simplified version of the technology. It’s virtually all-clear plastic and magnets so we are demonstrating obviously that there is no battery hidden and so on. What the system will be doing is literally lifting a weight, demonstrating work being done for free.”

Wired Blog and others are also carrying the news. A story in Silicon Republic excerpts an interview with Sean giving more technical details. For a list of recent online news articles relating to Steorn, check Google news here.

Below is a link to the page where the demo will be streaming live over the web. There will be four cameras trained on Orbo; of these only camera 4 is operational at the time of writing, and it is showing test footage.

Streaming video of Orbo demo

Update:

Due to technical difficulties with the Orbo device itself, the demo will not start today as planned, but rather tomorrow, July 5th. They intend to turn on the video stream around noon GMT. The statement released by Steorn about this is reprinted below. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether these are the same sorts of “technical difficulties” that have plagued all other perpetual motion machines in the past.

A test unit which was built yesterday in Kinetica, in the temporary lab we have set up. Once we had signed off on the final magnetic configurations we went to transfer this magnetic config to the display unit & casing on the exhibition floor.

Here they ran into some technical issues, firstly a problem with the bearings, which was fixed once identified. The next issue appears to be an environmental issue. We think possibly the temperature from the lighting system in the immediate area, but this has to be further assessed in the morning.

The current plan of action is to have a technical meeting in the morning and we will update you fr there – we are planning to turn on the web streaming by lunch time so we can give you an ongoing update on progress (and you can see some stressed Engineers working in real-time, if it is not fixed by then!)

The demo will go ahead as soon as we fix the small outstanding issues.

Please accept our apologies on this and we will update you first thing in the morning.

5 thoughts on “Steorn reveals Orbo today

  1. A perpetual motion machine that is disrupted by camera lighting? Are they sure of this?
    Maybe it only works when no-one is looking, and it is the presence of the cameras that is upsetting it.
    Or perhaps it only works when a leprachaun is about?
    Who are they fooling?

  2. I was on the site since 17:22 and one camera was working. The other 3 were not. It got time shifted 5 hours I would imagine so they can sort out the tech.
    A sensible thing would have been to have 12 high quality videos from each angle waiting on YouTube and Google Video in case such an event happened.
    What is the value of a “live” event anyway, given that you can see the machine in the flesh tomorrow in London? Most people just want to take a peek at whatt it is and recorded video is far more suitable for that than live streaming from a London Hotel room

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