Enable 3D Ambient Light Positioning with Mobile Phones and Battery-free Chips

Visible Light Positioning (VLP) has attracted much research effort recently. Most existing VLP approaches require special designed light or receiver, collecting light information or strict user operation (e.g., horizontally holding the mobile phone). This incurs a high deployment, maintenance and usage cost. We present RainbowLight, a low-cost ambient light 3D localization approach that is easy to deploy in today's buildings. Our key finding is that light through a chip of polarizer and birefringence material produces specific interference and light spectrum at different directions to the chip. We derive a model to characterize the relation for direction, light interference, and spectrum. Exploiting the model, RainbowLight calculates the direction to a chip after taking a photo containing the chip. With multiple chips, RainbowLight designs a direction intersection based method to derive the location. We implement RainbowLight and extensively evaluate its performance in various environments. The evaluation results show that RainbowLight achieves an average localization error of 3.3 cm in 2D and 9.6 cm in 3D for light on, and an error of 7.4 cm in 2D and 20.5 cm in 3D for light off scenario in the daytime.