Imagine using your car headlights to transmit data or surfing the web safely on a plane, tethered only by a line of sight. Yes. You read it correctly, Professor Harald Hass has developed a new prototype that uses just three components to justify his claim: a LED light, a solar panel and a display device/screen.
To further cement your trust into this article, here is a small intro about the man under the spotlight: Professor Haas received the PhD degree from the University of Edinburgh in 2001. He currently holds the Chair of Mobile Communications at the University of Edinburgh, and is co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of pureLiFi Ltd as well as the Director of the LiFi Research and Development Center at the University of Edinburgh. His main research interests are in optical wireless communications, hybrid optical wireless and RF communications, spatial modulation, and interference coordination in wireless networks.
Now back to his device, a solar cell is a device that converts incident light into electricity. When the incident intensity or brightness of the light is varied, the output current also varies accordingly. Hass has devised his prototype using the same principle. The intensity of the light is varied very rapidly, almost unnoticeable to the human eye and that signal is converted into the video that is to displayed by the screen or a laptop or any computer device. The data transfer rate of this device is believed to be fifty megabytes per second, which much higher than the data transfer rates that is currently provided by our broadband connections.
Hass initially used specially fabricated photo-detectors to enable this process, later he switched to solar cells to utilize the current infrastructure to its utmost potential. The device is completely eco-friendly and can be manufactured with no further increase in energy consumption than the present levels. Hass and his team believe that they can positively launch this project in a global scale in the next two to three years.
Hass first presented his device at a TED event, its link is provided below:
Posted by Apru
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