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Supermarket LED Lights Talk to Smartphone App

posted by martyb on Monday May 25 2015, @03:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the Aisle-B-Seeing-You dept.

n1 wrote with news of a report at the BBC:

French shoppers have become the first to experience a new LED lighting system that sends special offers and location data to their smartphones.

The technology was designed by Philips and has been installed at a Carrefour supermarket in Lille.

It transmits codes via light waves, which are undetectable to the eye but can be picked up by a phone camera.

The innovation offers an alternative to Bluetooth-based "beacons", which are being installed by many retailers.

[...]Carrefour is using the location data to trigger aisle-specific special offers. If users open a compatible app and let their smartphone camera look upwards, this can be used to determine their location - accurate to up to 1m - and the direction they are facing.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 25 2015, @06:48PM

    by VLM (445) on Monday May 25 2015, @06:48PM (#187691)

    There's a competing MUCH older system that sends an extremely low bit rate signal over fluorescent lights to shelf electronic price tags by snipping out a cycle here or there of AC. Obviously to avoid flicker and dimness complaints the baud rate has to be exceedingly slow, but timing 60 hz pulses isn't rocket surgery so you can embed a lot of data in the timing of occasional pulses. Say you made a scheme that did nothing on alternating seconds and pulsed one of 64 cycles in the next second thats 2 to the 6 bits every two seconds or "dozens of baud" more than fast enough to change shelf prices, probably not fast enough to spam customers. Anyway, yeah, a little pulsating white LED could do interesting things in theory. One problem is the camera isn't built for high bit rates.

    One amusing idea is combining the joke of QR codes with IR LED projectors... Thats almost too simple to imagine patenting.

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