Philips Lighting LAC:light communication

When:

23 February 2017,16:00 Hour

- 18:00 Hour

Location:High Tech Campus gebouw 48 Holstlaan 1 5656 AE Eindhoven

Event type:Bedrijfsbezoek

Event organizer:Elektrotechniek

Pricing KIVI leden:Free

Pricing Studenten (alleen na aanmelding):€5,00

Pricing Niet kIVi Leden:€10,00

Report of visit to Philips Lighting LAC and presentation of VLC Technology

The topic of the visit was the application of Visible Light Communication (VLC) with LED luminaires to enable location based services for office and retail. The visit started with demos in the Philips Lighting Application center (LAC). In the retail demo-area the influence of the spectral properties of the (LED) light were clearly demonstrated. The atmosphere and experience in the shop was determined to a large extend by the chosen lighting conditions. Adding VLC enabled luminaires allowed for determining the location of the shopper on his/her smartphone. This is the base for several interesting services to help the shopper and the retailer both.

Next the possibilities of choosing the lighting conditions and using the interaction with the luminaires was demonstrated in the office demo-area of the Philips LAC. The kind of illumination enhanced the working conditions in the office. VLC for interaction allowed for personalized conditions for a specific individual desk location.

After the demonstration of the opportunities with VLC based location-aware services Philips presented some of the technological issues to be solved to make VLC in a reliable system. Both transmitter and receiver were discussed. The transmitter is the LED with a special driver which modulates the light in a smart way (with a DC-free code called Ternary Manchester). The receiver is the camera of the smartphone. Special ways of processing the pixels of the camera enable detection of the information of the luminaire.

In a next step that information is combined with the known position of the LED to calculate the location of the smartphone. The software in the driver to program the light intensity and the software in the smart phone to calculate the location are an important ingredient. The data are linked to data from shop and office in the cloud to realize the service.

Several interesting uses cases were presented.

For a further look in the nearby future innovation see Tomorrow's Retail Philips Systems

See also the video, mentioned in the following presentatation: "The Edge: grenzeloze ambitie om personeel ideale kantooromgeving te bieden"

The presentation of Visual Lighting Communication by Philips Lighting is available using the link below.

Omschrijving

Visit to LAC
A visit to the Lighting Application Center (LAC) of Philips Lighting has been organized. The topic is Visible Light Communication (VLC) and value add location-based services at Philips Lighting. In the LAC lighting solutions are shown to Philips Lighting customers. Special areas to show retail and office applications have been build. Those include the location-based applications.

Offices and Shops with LED based fixtures
To optimize the experience of people working in offices or visiting shops it is very important to know his or her location. LEDs used for lighting provide an excellent opportunity to provide that information in a nice and interactive way. Visible Light Communication (VLC) can easily be incorporated in LED based fixtures. A unique code is sent out and detected by the smartphone of the user. In this way the location can be determined real-time with an accuracy of around 30 cm.

Technology for VLC with LEDs
The basics of the technology will be discussed including topics like coding, receiving on a phone, decoding and determining the location in shop or office. Once the location is known and linked into rich information in the cloud location based services can be defined. This will enable the customer in the shop to obtain help in finding products and have personalized offerings. Moreover, careful analysis of the big data originating from such a system can predict trends in the usage of the shop. The shop owner can use the results to optimize the layout of the shop.

Examples at Carrefour (shop) and The Edge (office)
The examples of location-based services in shops (Carrefour, Lille) and offices (The Edge office building, Amsterdam) will be discussed. These two examples show the possibilities of location-based information and how they have been integrated in the shop/office systems and some of the first results of the pilot experiments.

Demonstrations at the Philips Lighting Application Centre (LAC)
The visit will include demonstrations in the retail and office application areas. The LAC has recently moved to the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven and is now located in HTC48 (previously known as WA). To accommodate the LAC (and Philips Lighting) HTC 48 has been extensively renovated.

Spreker(s)

Dr.Ir. Stan Baggen, Fellow at Philips Lighting Research.
He is an expert in channel coding for applications ranging from optical recording, radio and VLC communication.

Ir. Onno Jansen, project leader location based services at Philips Lighting Research.