- This lamp beams the internet down to your computer.
It's called MyLiFi and that sounds like Wi-Fi
except it does it without wireless radio.
It uses light instead.
If you have a TV remote, you know it uses infrared
to beam out the changes to the channel.
This is the same thing but doing way more.
It uses infrared to send the internet down to computer
and then from your computer, back up to the lamp,
and then out to your router and to whatever website
you're trying to use.
So we're sitting here at CES.
We're gonna try it out.
This is my own laptop.
I just turned Wi-Fi off.
I don't have an internet connection.
So I need to use this dongle.
I'm gonna plug it into my computer,
to the actual USB port.
And they told me that it won't install anything.
It should just work.
So let me see if I can, yeah wait, it's blinking
green right now and I'm just gonna go to the Verge.
I think it's loading the Verge.
Yeah I just brought up a website.
It works, that's cool.
It shows me a few big benefits here.
One is security.
Instead of having a Wi-Fi network,
that somebody can tap into,
there's just this infrared that is really short range.
It's going from here to here
and it's going to be a lot harder to monitor
what you're doing.
They're selling a pro version that encrypts
all the traffic too.
The other benefit is supposed to be a health one,
because they're aren't radio waves.
Now very important to know that radio waves
are not actually known to be harmful to the human body.
So that's not really a benefit.
But if you're a person who worries about these things,
the option is there.
The downside though is that, at least for this
initial version, it's very short ranged.
This is a desk lamp and if I move it too far away,
you can see these lights start to go down to show
that my signal is breaking.
The company Oledcomm plans to introduce more lights
over time.
They're gonna do ceiling lights and wall lights.
They imagine that eventually we will light up an entire
room using these, and also get your internet that way,
which will give you a little bit more range of movement.
That might also hurt the security element a little bit,
but it still won't go through walls and so it's gonna be
confined to whichever room you would set up in.
For the time being it seems like it is maybe best for like
a really crazy business person, who like wants
a small range of movement and the security element.
It is sort of weird, because you could just plug it in
ethernet jack into your computer
'cos that's really what this is.
You see this yellow cable over here,
that's just an ethernet jack.
It's actually powering the lamp too.
The lamp itself is a pretty standard smart desk lamp.
It can change between warm and cool color temperatures.
So from bluer to more orange.
You can set a timer to turn it on and off over time.
You can also use an app to control when the internet
connection is activated.
That's actually kind of one of the weirder things.
In order to manage the lamp, you need to use an app
and to use the app, you have to use your phone
which requires Wi-Fi.
There's also a web app so you could theoretically
then go to a hard wire connection,
but if you're trying to totally avoid Wi-Fi
this is just really not a possibility.
The selling point here is really security.
You could just use an ethernet cord instead,
but there's something very neat about having
the stylish lamp.
MyLiFi is launching on Indiegogo.
It's actually already live.
You can go there and back it for 840 dollars
to get the lamp and the dongle.
That's supposed to be available sometime later this year.
(jingle music)