Enhance lighting for the Internet of Things

Today's Internet of Things (IoT), covering any communication between devices, is narrowband and not always provides reliability and low latency at the same time. A wide range of future IoT applications, i.e. flexible manufacturing, augmented reality and autonomous cars, will use artificial intelligence in the cloud to process sensor data jointly in real time. This future IoT will need mobile communication providing high bandwidth, reliable connectivity and low latency at the same time. While radio spectrum is densely populated, light communication (LC) can use unlicensed optical spectrum and enable high data rates over short distances for future IoT. By networking multiple LC-enabled access points, also known as Li-Fi, one can build a new mobile communication system integrated with lighting infrastructure that enables the future IoT. The main challenge to approach future IoT is to develop Li-Fi further into the mass-market serving a greater variety of use cases than today. Therefore, Li-Fi needs an open architecture, consensus building towards standards, a roadmap to support future IoT and technology demonstrations in real environments, such as indoors, manufacturing, logistics, conference rooms and outdoors for fixed-wireless access

Liquid crystals: a roundtable

This Roundtable began life as a public event on the subject of liquid crystals in our visual, material, media, scientific and artistic cultures. The event’s premise was that liquid crystals are the ur-form that constitute and govern Modernity and its after-shocks. For sure this is because the dialectic of liquidity and crystallization, of flow and refraction, is key to the advent of screen-based media (LCD TVs, computers and mobile devices) and thus how we perceive, image and imagine the world. As such, liquid crystals as a ‘phase of matter’ are epochal. But more than this because, while the emergence of such a brave new world is manifestly contemporary and their ‘discovery’ is comparatively recent (1888), the very fact of liquid crystals goes back at least 4.5 billion years: water, for instance, is crystalline and thus our planet, our ecology and we ourselves are always already liquid crystal. Such a self-evident but underacknowledged fact, discerned and foregrounded superbly by Esther Leslie in her recent book Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (2016), becomes an occasion to bring together historians, theorists and practitioners of the convergences of design-science, media-ecology, political-aesthetics, and graphic-technologies. Using Leslie’s book as a springboard, each of the five contributors, including Leslie herself, were invited to deliver a 10-minute presentation, an opening statement to set the scene, and raise fundamental questions to be considered further in the ensuing discussion. This structure is retained here, along with some of the informality that live conversation afford