@Suiseiseki > I'm not sure about Li-Fi, as I reckon many manufacturers couldn't help but to crank up the TX power and blind people.

It'd clearly need to be adjustable, because risking the triggering of seizures or blinding (whether temporary or not) would be unacceptable.

I think infrared signaling would be a potentially interesting option there. It doesn't need to be particularly powerful for electronics to receive it and very few user-oriented items emit it in a way that couldn't be fairly easily filtered out/tolerated as noise.

> It could be a device-to-device meshnet, with many base stations, provided all the devices are in visual range (with maybe a backup wireless link), but sensitive enough detectors that can pick up for example a stream of single photos are patented up the wazoo and such sort of bandwidth and connection sharing arrangements are prevented as much as possible.

Basically all of those patents should be invalidated for prior work (of which there is quite a bit online), but mostly I think they should all be invalidated because the entire patent office should be invalidated as harmful to scientific and societal progress. (A lot of energy/resource efficiency improvements that we *need* with the climate crisis are locked away by patent rentseeking.)