Li-Fi.
Communications over light.
It’s not new, it’s been around for years.
What’s new, is they have refined it and say they can move massive amounts of data to lots of people.
(Think spamming an entire supermarket of people at once).
http://purelifi.com/what_is_li-fi/
The term Li-Fi was coined by pureLiFi’s CSO, Professor Harald Haas, and refers to visible light communications (VLC) technology that delivers a high-speed, bidirectional networked, mobile communications in a similar manner as Wi-Fi.
With VLC, data is transmitted by modulating the intensity of the light, which is then received by a photo-sensitive detector, and the light signal is demodulated into electronic form. This modulation is performed in such a way that it is not perceptible to the human eye.
Your cell phone picks up the change in intensity and converts it to info.
Be it an ad or a message from your other half.
Once again, I am struggling to think where this could be used rather than WiFi which everyone has and understands.
(Just because you can do something – does not mean it will make you a market leader (or rich) just because you do it).
I guess the real use case is for security. If you can’t see the light, you can not get access to the information that is on it.
All that aside, I blog about it because I think its worth keeping an eye on tech like this. It might be a low power way for a sensor to upload data.
If there is less overhead on flashing an LED then there is in joining a WiFi access point, they could really be onto something.
