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.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday May 25 2015, @07:22PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Fi [wikipedia.org]
Rather than infrared: "Visible light communications (VLC) works by switching bulbs on and off within nanoseconds,[6] which is too quickly to be noticed by the human eye. Although Li-Fi bulbs would have to be kept on to transmit data, the bulbs could be dimmed to the point that they were not visible to humans and yet still functional.[7] The light waves cannot penetrate walls which makes a much shorter range, though more secure from hacking, relative to Wi-Fi.[8][9] Direct line of sight isn't necessary for Li-Fi to transmit a signal; light reflected off the walls can achieve 70 Mbit/s."
And:
I'm a little surprised that existing smartphone cameras can detect switching bulbs on the order of nanoseconds. They also say the positioning on the Phillips system is more accurate than "competing systems" and that supermarkets might save money over Bluetooth beacons because they are repurposing the lighting system.
And what's this? The Phillips system uses 50% less energy... Is that because it's replacing CFLs with LEDs?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]