Harald Haas: Forget Wi-Fi. Meet the new Li-Fi Internet
Harald Haas is the pioneer behind a new technology that can communicate as well as illuminate. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
for the first time in public
acting as a receiver.
it's just light.
extension of the Internet
"The Internet of Things" --
connected to the Internet.
of the Internet can only work
infrastructure as much as possible.
and the LED come in.
to transmit data incredibly fast,
of the brightness.
we have many LEDs around us,
of Li-Fi transmitters around us.
special devices -- small photo detectors,
encoded in the data.
existing infrastructure
solar cells and solar panels.
and converts it into electrical energy.
to charge our mobile phone.
of the brightness of the LED,
from the solar cell.
a principal mechanism in place
and by the solar cell,
of the energy harvested
changes of the brightness,
by our LED lights?
megabytes per second
broadband connections these days.
off-the-shelf LED lamp.
off-the-shelf solar cell;
we harvest from the solar cell.
something at the moment.
harvests light from the ambient light.
is switch on the light,
the instrument jumps to the right.
from this artificial light source.
the streaming of the video.
by pressing this button.
is streaming a video
in a very subtle way,
recognize with your eye,
are too fast to recognize.
the energy harvesting drops
the video will restart.
and energy harvesting stops as well.
acts as a receiver.
is a street light, and there's fog.
a handkerchief with me.
over the solar cell.
the handkerchief to the solar cell,
and stream that information,
a solar cell has become a receiver
encoded in light,
as an energy-harvesting device.
on the roof of a hut
or indeed, lamp post.
where the beam hits the solar cell.
integrated into windows,
into street furniture,
into these billions of devices
these devices regularly,
every few months.
I've shown this in public.
that we can take this to market
to closing the digital divide,
of devices to the Internet.
of energy consumption --
quite the opposite.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Harald Haas - Communications technology innovatorHarald Haas is the pioneer behind a new technology that can communicate as well as illuminate.
Why you should listen
Imagine using your car headlights to transmit data ... or surfing the web safely on a plane, tethered only by a line of sight. Harald Haas is working on it. 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.
Haas has long been studying ways to communicate electronic data signals, designing modulation techniques that pack more data onto existing networks. But his latest work leaps beyond wires and radio waves to transmit data via an LED bulb that glows and darkens faster than the human eye can see. His group published the first proof-of-concept results demonstrating that it is possible to to turn commercially available light emitting diode (LED) light bulbs into broadband wireless transmission systems.
"It should be so cheap that it's everywhere," he says. "Using the visible light spectrum, which comes for free, you can piggy-back existing wireless services on the back of lighting equipment."
Harald Haas | Speaker | TED.com