This talk provides an overview of the latest underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) research from the system to the device level. Besides, studies investigating underwater channel characterization are also described. OCIS codes: (060.4510) Optical communications; (250.0250) Optoelectronics; (040.5160) Photodetectors.Numerous human underwater activities, ranging from mineral resource exploiting to marine life discovery and even environment monitoring, creating huge demand of highly reliable, secured and high data rate underwater wireless communication systems, as shown in Fig. 1. Compared with radio-frequency (RF) and acoustic wave underwater communications, underwater wireless optical communications (UWOC) outperform in various aspect, such as unlicensed spectrum, large bandwidth (THz) [1] and low data latency.