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Transform Cellphones Into a CCTV Swarm
holy_calamity writes "Swiss researchers have developed java software that has bluetooth-capable camera phones form a distributed camera network. Each phone shares information on visual events with its neighbours and can work out the spatial position of phones around it (pdf). The software will become open source sometime next year, and the creators say it could be used to make a quick and dirty surveillance system. 'The phones currently use the average speed people walk to guess the distances between themselves, based on how long people take to move from one phone's view to another's. In testing, the system determined the distances between each phone with about 95% accuracy. They were placed 4 metres apart, making it accurate to about 20 centimetres. In future, recording the speed at which objects pass by would make more accurate judgments possible.'"
...now stalking my favorite celebrity can be a group event!
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
it could be used to make a quick and dirty surveillance system
Emphasis on "dirty". People take those things into their homes and leave them on their bedroom end-tables you know.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Or even worse, mandatory!
The Swiss team also found a unique characteristic of the network that it used to swarm around one of the nodes more often than not. Later they pinned it on the only hot blonde in the team.
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
A CCTV system from BT cellphones ? Why, oh why ? Because boffins have time and my money to lose ?
Somebody please explain the use of such a... discovery ?
Ah.
Surveillance.
I get it now. The T word is about to be spoken, again. Great. I'm looking forward to BT-holding surveillance militia roaming the streets.
Good!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't CCTV mean "closed-circuit television"? As in, the camera is connected with a solid conductor to the display? If that's the case, then wouldn't a system that transmitted video over the air (at least, without displaying it locally first) be something other than CCTV?