You can watch Lux’s interview with Shuji Nakamura here: 

As Philips announces they are investing in Li-Fi, this week we explore a new technology that has the ability to change the world. What is Li-Fi and how will revolutionise the way we receive the internet into our homes? Lux Today 21 February 2017

The smart city revolution shows no signs of slowing down, and the opportunities for the lighting industry are ripe for the taking. In the run up to Lux’s Lighting Fixture Design Conference, which will run from the 21 to the 22nd of February in Central London, they reveal their top five smart cites, where lighting is allowing city authorities to reimagine how our population centres are managed.

5) Los Angeles

Los Angeles is currently seeing through a plan to replace every old sodium-vapour streetlight with smart LED fixtures. The city is now 80 percent of the way through the project, which has seen the conversion of nearly 200,000 street lights. The project has saved the city over nine million dollars and has acted to reduce crime.

The existing streetlight poles are being replaced with ‘smartpoles’, which are fitted with 4G LTE wireless technology and act to improve phone reception in the tightly packed city. The smart street lights are also capable of alerting city authorities when a fixture breaks down and is need of repair and some are also able to monitor and compile analytics on traffic levels and the availability of parking places.

As we reported last year some Los Angeles street lights are able to use sensors to listen out for car crashes, reporting them to the emergency services when they occur.

Singapore is aiming to become the world’s first ‘smart nation’. Sensors and cameras are being installed to track absolutely everything from traffic to the capacity of wastepaper bins.

In Singapore lighting plays a role in the city’s incredibly smart transport network, which utilises road sensors, smart traffic lights and smart parking.

Late last year Philips Lighting announced a partnership with the Sentosa Development Corporation to develop a connected streetlight management system on Singapore’s island resort of Sentosa.

It was also recently announced that visible light communication (VLC) is being installed in the massive CapitaLand Mall to create an indoor positioning system that allows shoppers to find their favourite stores amid the mall’s labyrinth of aisles and corridors.

The authorities in Singapore have also joined forces with Scottish Li-Fi firm pureLifi, in an attempt to bring the revolutionary technology to the South-Asian city-state.

Copenhagen is already one of the world’s most sustainable and smart cities and it aims to become carbon neutral by the year 2025. Nearly half of the city’s street lights were replaced recently with LED. A number of these new fixtures form the backbone of a growing smart lighting network.

The LED streetlights brighten when vehicles approach and then dim after they pass, ensuring that roads are not continuously illuminated when it is not necessary. This is a safer option than turning off streetlights altogether in order to save money, which has been the case in the UK.

The sensor-laden light fixtures are also able to capture data and analytics and are able to help coordinate the city’s services. For example, fixtures can alert city authorities that waste bins need to be emptied.

San Francisco was arguably one of the first smart cities in the world and given its location, near Silicon Valley, this should hardly be surprising.

The city has more LEED-certified buildings than any other in the United States and a connected city initiative enables residents to locate parking places.

It was recently announced that 18,500 of San Francisco’s light-pressure sodium street light fixtures would be replaced with smart LEDs.

The LED revolution has concluded, prices are falling and the industry’s attention is turning to the digital world, to the internet of things and smart cities.

In a Lux Today special edition, we examine smart cities and ask how is lighting improving our urban environments? Why are more and more cities adopting smart technology? And why does the lighting industry need to move quickly to take advantage of this new innovation?

The development is the latest leap forward in the up-hill gallop that is the progression of Li-Fi, and is a move that will no-doubt raise the profile of the new technology, by rolling it out onto a bigger stage.

The first live demonstration of Li-Fi in front of an audience was given just a few weeks ago at LuxLive in London.

Recently though, the technology’s forward momentum seems to have slowed down a little, with limited pilot implementations and demos from vendors such as Scotland’s pureLi-Fi and others, being the only evidence of implementation of the technology in the field.

The news from Philips is likely to reverse this trend and the company looks set to invest in the technology in a push toward commercialising it.

The lighting giant is planning to leap into the new and, potentially, lucrative Li-Fi market, by purchasing Luciom, a small French company, which specialises in visible light communication (VLC).

‘Philips Lighting acquired Luciom at the end of 2016,’ a Philips spokesperson confirmed to Lux’s sister publication, LEDs Magazine, noting that all eight of Luciom’s employees now work for Philips.

Luciom is developing several technologies related to VLC, including Li-Fi. Philips appears to be particularly interested in Luciom’s potential to improve Li-Fi in several ways, including speed, coding, decoding and reliability.

Once Li-Fi spreads as a technology, it is hoped that it can become another means of wireless internet transmission, assisting and complementing Wi-Fi, by opening much more frequency to internet use.

Wi-Fi with its radio frequencies is more limited than the considerably wider spectrum of LED lightwaves on which Li-Fi data rides.

Luciom is best known for a ‘tagging’ scheme, which individual LED lights use to uniquely identify themselves in one-way indoor-positioning systems. Compared to two-way Li-Fi, indoor-positioning is a more basic form of VLC that sends small amounts of information from a light to a phone or other gadget.

A number of retailers are experimenting with one-way VLC to try to engage shoppers in stores with information and direct them to promotions. Philips has had a trial with a Carrefour store in France and with the Dubai-based retail chain aswaaq. In the US, Target is trialing the technology, although it has never revealed its supplier, as  Lux Review reported last year.

Philips is believed to have acquired Luciom for less than €10 million. LEDs Magazine understands that at one point Philips might have raised patent infringement queries related to Luciom, which could have factored into the price of the purchase.

‘The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed,’ the Philips spokesperson said via email, in response to questions about any patent implications.

Will tunable street light breakthrough silence LED critics? PLUS: Smart street lights tell cities when to salt frozen roads. AND: LED protest signs take centre stage at demonstrations. Lux Today 7 February 2017.

Pioneering smart-lighting revolutionises European city. PLUS: President Obama gives Detroit an LED parting gift. AND: Australia launches free LED luminaire scheme. Lux 31 January 2017