Leigh Christie, a researcher at MIT, is tired of walking into empty rooms kept at a cozy 72 degrees, so he came up with a solution. He hooked up a motion tracking device to a rotating heat emitter. The device follows you as you move around a space, shooting a beam of heat in your direction. His idea is to heat people, not buildings, which might help save a lot of energy that’s wasted on empty rooms. His vision, he says, is to cut CO2 emissions from heating by 50 percent and save $120 billion in heating costs.
Watch the device in action at MIT:

The cost of the emitter that generates the heat is still a few thousand dollars, and tracking large groups of people might be difficult. But given how much we spend on heating buildings in cold climates, the idea is definitely something to keep an eye on.
Here’s a TEDx talk Christie gave in Boston on November 16.