So if you recall not too long ago I had writ­ten about Li-Fi or light fideli­ty and how it was a game chang­er. Well it so hap­pens that the inven­tor Pro­fes­sor Har­ald Haas has recent­ly pre­sent­ed a TED talk show­cas­ing a pro­to­type exam­ple of how his “light inter­net” would work. I’ll reit­er­ate again what this is, “broad­band trans­mis­sion using the Vis­i­ble Light Spec­trum or VLS. This is part of the elec­tro­mag­net­ic spec­trum, just like radio waves, is safe, prac­ti­cal to use and mul­ti-func­tion­al”. So with stan­dard-off-the-shelf LED’s (light-emit­ting diode), numer­ous tests were made and it appears that LED light­ing fix­tures can trans­mit wire­less data at very com­pet­i­tive high speeds.

I def­i­nite­ly rec­om­mend that you watch the TED talk here:

A com­mer­cial prod­uct start­ed ship­ping sev­er­al months ago as Haas has launched a com­mer­cial ven­ture called pure­Li­Fi. The prod­uct, Li-Flame, turns stan­dard LED fix­tures into wire­less Inter­net access points.

Let’s take this idea a lit­tle fur­ther. You know we’ve also been fol­low­ing wear­able tech like Disney’s EM-Sense, but what would hap­pen if the clothes you wore on your body was a Li-Fi hotspot or hub? Well you know that the appli­ca­tions can only be guessed at but researchers at the Korea Advanced Insti­tute of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy (KAIST) have cre­at­ed a fiber-like LED that can be direct­ly knit­ted or woven to fab­ric itself. Pro­fes­sor Choi, head of the research team at the School of Elec­tri­cal Engi­neer­ing at KAIST says “We hope we can low­er the bar­ri­er of wear­able dis­plays enter­ing the market.”

The researchers say they can con­trol the thick­ness of the strands to with­in hun­dreds of thou­sandths of a nanome­ter. That’s super fine if you haven’t gath­ered. LED fibers could be mass-pro­duced as eas­i­ly as nylon or poly­eth­yl­ene fiber is pro­duced today. “This tech­nol­o­gy will even­tu­al­ly allow the pro­duc­tion of wear­able dis­plays to be as easy as mak­ing clothes,” said Seon-Il Kwon, of the Engi­neer­ing team.

But if LED’s can be used to trans­mit high vol­umes of data, to include stream­ing HD video and peo­ple start wear­ing LED fab­ric dis­play cloth­ing, that means every­one every­where would be send­ing vol­umes of data that can’t even be com­pre­hend­ed by the human mind. We are talk­ing mobile serv­er hubs and net­works criss-cross­ing every­where trans­fer­ring copi­ous data to every­one! Take it a step fur­ther and make every piece of attire a part of the blockchain, you begin to not even under­stand what the future could look like in just 10 years min­i­mum. Your T‑shirt could become a price­less piece of human tech­no­log­i­cal society!

The major fac­tor to walk away from this is Media is under­go­ing a huge sea-change that is based on one of the most fun­da­men­tal phys­i­cal com­po­nents elec­tron­ic light. What would and could you do with this infor­ma­tion? Think about it.