CNN Make Create Innovate programme
Professor Harald Haas has been featured on the first edition of CNN’s ‘Make Create Innovate’ programme, presented by Nick Glass, CNN’s International Correspondent.
Nick Glass asks “Someone once said ‘Let there be light’. Is this how we will access the internet in the future? At the speed of light.”
He talked to Professor Haas in his University of Edinburgh laboratory about turning light bulbs into broadband communication devices with his Li-Fi technology as the answer to the problem of congested bandwidth.
Dungeon experiment
They visit Edinburgh Castle for an experiment to show Li-Fi working in the real world. They descend down to the castle dungeons, hundreds of feet underground, in the deepest part of this ancient royal fortress.
Without even so much as a cell signal down in the dungeons, Professor Haas shows that we can still communicate, even send a large video file. He manages to stream high-definition video to an LED lamp, which is using an ordinary LED light bulb you can buy off the shelf.
Li-Fi in ten years
Nick Glass asked “If I come back in 10 years, where will this technology have gone?” Professor Haas’s response was “Imagine where you have light sources in shopping windows, traffic lights, street lights, in airplanes, in trains, at home, under water. Everywhere where you have light, you have a means of communicating.”