Mobile computing is accelerating beyond the smartphone era. Today, people wear smart glasses, smart watches and fitness devices, and they carry smartphones, tablets and laptops. In a decade, the very same people are likely to wear or carry tens of wireless devices and interact with the internet and computing infrastructure in markedly different ways. Computer scientist Xia Zhou is working to make sure there are no traffic jams with the increased demand. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Zhou and her team at Dartmouth College are developing ways to encode and transmit all that data faster and more securely with the visible light spectrum. They see visible light communication as a much-needed advance in wireless data transmission.

The research in this episode was supported by NSF award #1421528, Networking and Sensing Using Visible Light Communications.