History
The history of Visible Light Communications (VLC) dates back to 1880 when Scottish born Canadian Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the Photophone which transmitted speech on modulated sunlight over several hundred meters. It is interesting to note that this actually pre-dates the transmission of speech via radio.
More recently the Nakagawa Laboratory, in Keio University, Japan began work in 2003 using LEDs to transmit data by visible light. Since then there have been numerous research activities focussed on VLC. The notable research activities being Smart Lighting Engineering Centre, Omega Project, COWA, ByteLight, Inc.D-Light Project, UC-Light Centre and work at Oxford University.
Back in 2006, researchers from CICTR at Penn State proposed a combination of power line communication (PLC) and white light LED to provide broadband access for indoor applications. This research suggested that VLC could be deployed as a perfect last-mile solution in future.
In January 2010 a team of researchers from Siemens and Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications (Heinrich Hertz Institute in Berlin) demonstrated transmission at 500 Mbit/s with a white LED over a distance of 5 metres (16 ft), and 100 Mbit/s over longer distance using five LEDs.
The VLC standardization process is conducted within IEEE Wireless Personal Area Networks working group (802.15).
In December 2010 St. Cloud, Minnesota was the first to commercially deploy this technology.
In July 2011 a live demonstration of high definition video being transmitted from a standard LED lamp was shown at TED Global.
Recently, VLC-based indoor positioning system has become an attractive topic. Publications have been coming from Nakagawa Laboratory, COWA at Penn State and other researchers around the world.
Read more about this topic: Visible Light Communication
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)