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The light from the lamps in your house could carry a wireless signal that could power internet connectivity at home, say a group of German researchers who say they have found a way to encode the signals into visible frequency.

Though it would provide much lower speeds than Wi-Fi signals, it can offer less interference and is likely to offer great protection from hackers, say the researchers.

Currently, most homes use radio-frequency based Wi-Fi signals for broadband service. But Wi-Fi has limited bandwidth, says the researchers, and it is difficult to get more radio spectrum for it. Visible frequency would be a good alternative, they say.

Flickering the lights can generate the signal in a room. The change won’t be visible to the human eye because the rate of modulation is millions of times faster than what we can see, say the researchers. And since, visible light can’t penetrate walls there will be no interference.

Since incandescent and fluorescent bulbs can’t flicker fast enough, LEDs would be the right choice, say the researchers.

Commercial LEDs have a bandwidth of only a few MHz. But Jelena Vučić, a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, and her colleagues who have been working on the project have found a way to increase the bandwidth by filtering out all wavelengths but blue.

Using the visible wireless system they built, the team downloaded data at up to 230 megabits per second. The researchers will present their findings at a conference in San Diego later this month.

[via Inhabitat]

Photo: (slworking/Flickr)

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Plastic Logic, which was set to ship its large screen Que e-reader in April, is now delaying it to “sometime this summer.”

The company sent notifications to pre-order customers late Thursday afternoon announcing the delay and saying it needed the time to “fine-tune features and enhance the overall product.”

Plastic Logic launched the Que at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. The Que proReader has an 8.5 x 11-inch touchscreen display and the ability to handle a range of documents such as Microsoft Word files, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, digital books, PDFs, magazines and newspapers. It can also synchronize with Microsoft Outlook to display e-mails and calendar.

A 4-GB version of the Que with Wi-Fi and storage for about 35,000 documents will cost $650. An $800 8-GB version that can store 75,000 documents and includes both Wi-Fi and 3G capability — powered by AT&T– will be $800.

Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta didn’t reveal the exact reasons for the delay. But if it is to make sure that the company works out all the kinks in the product before it ships, he may have made the right decision. Last year, many e-reader enthusiasts criticized Barnes & Noble for rushing its Nook e-reader to market. Barnes & Noble has since the launch offered firmware updates to fix some of the Nook’s problems.

But the delay is also likely to cost Plastic Logic some ground. Apple’s iPad tablet will be available April 3 and the device starts at $500. Though it doesn’t offer an E Ink screen, the iPad is also targeted at consumers who want to read digital books. Apple will have its own iBook store, similar to iTunes, so consumers can buy digital books directly from the device.

Meanwhile, other companies such as Dell and HP are also planning to launch their own tablets and plan to highlight digital reading as one of the key experiences on the device.

See Also:

• Plastic Logic Aims New Que E-Reader at Business Users
• CES 2010: Que Touchcreen E-Reader Packs in Features – Video – Wired
• Slim, Large Screen E-Reader Skiff to Debut on Sprint
• New Freescale Chip Could Birth a $150 E-Reader

Photo: Que (Priya Ganapati/Wired.com)

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When it began taking pre-orders for the iPad this morning, Apple also published some new details about how the tablet device will function as an e-book reader.

It turns out the iPad will read books out loud to you with audio dictation, a controversial feature that caused some trouble for Amazon’s Kindle last year. Also, Apple indicated that you’ll be able to use the iPad to read EPUB titles from sources outside of the iBooks store.

The new features are described in the iBooks overview page on Apple’s website. In the section titled “Change your reading habits,” Apple says its VoiceOver functionality — an accessibility tool that works in other parts of the iPad’s interface to help visually impaired users — will also work to dictate e-books.

“IBooks works with VoiceOver, the screen reader in iPad, so it can read you the contents of any page,” Apple’s description reads.

And for EPUB titles that are not offered through the iBooks store, you can manually add them to iTunes and then sync them to the iPad:

“The iBooks app uses the EPUB format — the most popular open book format in the world,” Apple’s site reads. “That makes it easy for publishers to create iBooks versions of your favorite reads. And you can add free EPUB titles to iTunes and sync them to the iBooks app on your iPad.

That’s good news for iPad customers, because that means bookworms won’t be limited to the offerings in the iBooks store, which are based on partnerships that Apple inked with publishers.

The new detail about audio dictation should raise more questions. Amazon’s Kindle 2 reader shipped with a function to read e-books out loud, and the Authors Guild made a fuss alleging copyright violations that would cut into sales of audiobooks.

“They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”

The guild contended that authors should be awarded audio-licensing fees for e-books. Responding to the criticism, Amazon said “no copy is made, no derivative work is created and no performance is being given.” Nonetheless, Amazon in late February 2009 gave rights-owners the choice to enable or disable the audio function title by title.

There’s no word on whether the Author’s Guild will pursue a similar complaint against Apple.

The National Federation of the Blind has already applauded Apple for including VoiceOver in the iPad.

iBooks description [Apple]

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Additional reporting by Charlie Sorrel

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