Using LED lights to transmit data

“Smart Lighting” is a concept being developed at the university of Boston. The idea is to use LED lights to not only brighten the room, but also to send data to various devices in the light’s line of sight. LED lights can flicker (hence creating 0 and 1 necessary to transport digital data) fast enough to be imperceptible by human eyes. The research team working on this project believes that wireless speeds of 1Mbps to 10Mbps can be expected when they get it to work. There’s probably no real demand for this on the computers front, but other non-connected devices could be made to be connected this way. Think of it as Infra-Red data transmission with added “LED cool”. [via cellularnews]