Saturday, July 17, 2010

Data Through Visible Light

When I heard about Data Through Visible Light, I thought it was something about fibre optics, but this is something different. This is an LED based light transmitting a data stream through alpha waves (light in the range of human vision). On the surface this might seem pointless, but it has a few tantalising applications.

Imagine an advert on television where by using a mobile phone camera you could download the product. Or if you are in a club the lights could tell you what music was playing. Or if a power LED on a product could stream detailed information about what it was doing. Imagine a situation where you have twenty or more televisions that you want to display the same image, in sync from the same video source, with current technology that would take a lot of cables, but with this the screens would only need to see the light from a single source.

The future of all electronics will be to make them wireless and this will be another tool. Wither it will be a staple of consumer electronics is yet to see, but all mobile phones have cameras.