Huh, now I remember a 90's or early 00's watch that has data, and the way to upload data onto it was by running a special Windows program that would flicker an area of the screen black and white. You'd point the face of your watch to it and the flickering had data encoded onto it.
I mostly remember infrared transfers in the context of beaming contacts between PalmPilots. It was pretty fast for that, and actually, much more reliable than modern AirDrop.