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Comment by alok-g | Hacker News Reader

This is not a new idea. Saw a functional demo more than eight years back. Checkout: http://www.talking-lights.com/

Completely correct. This is not a new idea at all. However TalkingLights had a huge bandwidth limit because they used flourescent lighting.

LEDs can go to much higher speeds - but even still, this isn't new. Researchers in Japan and Boston University have been producing demos for years:

http://www.bu.edu/smartlighting/research/smart-light-prototy...

http://www.naka-lab.jp/index_e.html

This seems to be different. In your link posted, the lights serve as simple positioning beacons. It seems analogous to the bandwidth we've come to expect from things like infrared remote controls.

In this case, and indeed the whole point of the talk, is they're transmitting HD video.

The concept of transmitting data through light has been around forever. For my undergrad physics lab class in college, my team used a laser to transmit audio. Another team did a similar thing except they hooked it up to computers and sent jpeg's. This was probably seven years ago, and this wasn't the first time that projects like this had been done for this class.

Lasers are completely different. Ever heard of fiber-optic communication? This is about using light for both illumination and communication at the same time.

Edison only had you beat by 100 years

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Photophone

At least since Alexander Graham Bell and the optical telephone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photophone

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