Believe it or not, someday your desk lamp might also send high-definition video to your TV.
Last month, engineering professor Harald Haas of Jacobs University in Edinburgh, Scotland, demonstrated a cutting-edge technology that allows an LED light bulb — the kind found in millions of U.S. homes — to transmit high-speed data streams.
Speaking during the TEDGlobal conference, Haas said that the world is already running out of radio spectrum used to send wireless communications, and the world’s 1.4 million cell towers are expensive to maintain and operate. Sending that data through visible light, which is a much larger band of spectrum, could satiate world demand for connectivity.
Watch Haas present his ideas on LED light bulbs and high-speed data transmission in this video.