Light-Based GPS
As many people know, GPS systems work great in open outdoor spaces, but perform very poorly indoors and in urban areas. There are quite a few different methods to mitigate this problem in development or available now, and here’s a new one: Each light bulb in a commercial building flickers at a specific frequency, and a handheld gadget reads the frequency of the flicker, and determines its location.
Frequency-modulated light communication has been tossed around for a little while now, but other than theory and research projects, we haven’t seen many useful civilian applications to date. The concept is a great one, as there are light bulbs all around us, and in theory we could make a mesh network intranet using light bulbs that talked to each other.
What do you think, will this light-based communication paradigm ever gain significant ground, or will it remain a novelty for years to come?
http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2008/02/lightbased_hospital_gps_for_ lost_patients.html
