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Wi-Fi Signals Allow Gesture Recognition All Through the Home
vinces99 writes "Forget to turn off the lights before leaving the apartment? No problem. Just raise your hand, finger-swipe the air and your lights will power down. Want to change the song playing on your music system in the other room? Move your hand to the right and flip through the songs. University of Washington computer scientists have developed gesture-recognition technology that brings this a step closer to reality. They have shown it's possible to use Wi-Fi signals around us to detect specific movements without needing sensors on the human body or cameras. By using an adapted Wi-Fi router and a few wireless devices in the living room, users could control their electronics and household appliances from any room in the home with a simple gesture."
The last think I want it the system to detect me fapping and turn the tv to CSPAN and turn all the lights on!
Silence is a state of mime.
They use "machine learning" to train the computer to recognize each gesture. You'll have to retrain the computer every time you change position of yourself or any object near you. It's a cute parlor trick, but nothing like what a real radar could do.
Didn't the hitchhiker's guide have something like this? Once you got your environment the way you wanted it then you couldn't move or you ended up resetting everything?
Wouldn't the DOJ just LOVE this if they could force manufacturers to give them remote access. With a warrant, of course (wink wink!) Is there nothing in a modern house that can't be re-purposed to spy on us anymore?
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
...Leon wants his Theremin back.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Think of all the gestures that could trigger Marvin Gaye songs and soft lighting.
But more disconcerting ins the fact that even if rolled out with the best of intentions, this will inevitably lead to parents, flatmates, and siblings using it to spy on each other in some way.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Can you imagine? who needs a remote control? now, if only you could have a few WI-FI control robots to answer the door and throw away the garbage.. :)
Oh Hi! I noticed that you like play industrial metal goth core all night long. I support your habit, and will give you this fancy Wi-Fi router that connects to you amp and allows remote control from everywhere!
Now I can turn the your music up from my apartment, so I can hear it better ya know.
In this way, a smart home could become a reality, allowing you to turn off the oven timer with a simple wave of the hand, or turn on the coffeemaker from your bed.
I don't understand it; whenever the mailman shows up to give mom a special delivery in her room, the coffeemaker suddenly starts turning on---off---on--off--on-off-on-off-on-off---on-----off.
Few people have an app or web page to control their home appliances, but we're supposed to believe that we want gesture control?
Home automation is nothing new and there are certainly people that *can* control their home lighting and appliances remotely, but few even bother because it's not that useful in practice.
If I forget to turn off the lights when I leave the house, I'm probably not going to remember that the lights are on when I'm at the office and turn them off from there. I'd be better off with a smarter house that turns on the appropriate level of lighting when I walk in a room and turn off all the lights and appliances for me when I leave.
Gesture based music control would probably be more handy than remote lighting control.
So... maybe "The Force" or "magic" is just an accumulation of old wifi products?
There's something in the Wi-Fi. This whole world is swimming in Wi-Fi. We're living in a Wi-Fi soup. Suppose something got inside it... suppose there was something living in the Wi-Fi harvesting human minds! Imagine that.
This feature will not be made available in Italy.
I think the motion was going to change the radio station...
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
Zaphod waved a hand and the channel switched again.
"I've written new software that can use the wifi signals bouncing around in your home to help you change channels on your TV, or possibly give surreptitious surveillance to any law enorcement agency that can get a bullshit warrant from a rubber stamp judge. We promise it will only be used to help you change the TV channel."
Do programmers even filter this stuff through their conscience any more?
.
Branching from an idea from over a decade ago. http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N63/Stealth.63f.html
This is not unlike 3D video, a sort-of-possibly-good feature that requires upgrades to a large subset of your electronics. I have some old but serviceable stereo components, and my TV is 5 years old, which is old in the TV industry as it is-- heck, the remote control on the TV doesn't even work, so changing inputs is tricky. Most of my stuff will not work with this rig. Airport is similar. It kind of works, with lots of gotchas (no oggs in your library, right? And that iPod Touch is too old to stay connected after it goes to sleep, and then requires a power-off reset, right?).
This new feature is an invitation to upgrade a bunch of tech. Of course, logically all that tech needs to be refreshed every 5 years or so anyway. I don't think the motion input is a compelling feature, and hence not worth the investment. I don't use Siri on my phone either. Maybe I'm just too old to learn a new input method.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
I'll tell you when you're older, dear.
"Luke, pull my finger!"
Table-ized A.I.
Its basically in hole Doppler radar powered by wifi. It can see motion toward and away from the transmitters and receivers. Thanks to having multiple antennas, multiple transmitters, and reflections, it can see motion in many places, in many directions. However, I don't think they have a good way to get absolute location, or absolute direction in most cases. This means it can minimally pick up some gestures, isn't great at general spying (it can't tell who you are, or where). All the demoed gestures seemed to be multi-part sequences, I assume to prevent most false positives, which suggest its accuracy is quite low (as expected).
So in short, it might work for the intended use, but is pretty bad at general spying without significant knowledge of the space its installed in, and a good deal of work. (If you knew where the doorways and rooms were and where the device is, I bet you could detect which ones were open, when people passed between room, when people were home etc, but not much beyond that). Thats still pretty creepy.
It might be useful in security contexts: put it in your workplace, It can log/notify when things are moving around when the shouldn't be. Darn cheep multi room security (unfortunately it might also be able to see outside and get some false positives, or that might be useful in some cases)
This is just another example of why I wish my modem and router and wifi were separate (like they used to be): I could install cool tech like this if I wanted, without replacing the whole thing, and be able to configure my router (which would not at all controlled by the ISP/modem) to block any attempt for it to send outgoing stuff. The whole integrated modem rounter wifi thing is a horrible concept.
So, all of those fancy gestures they make in anime to make their powers work is just them communicating with their weapons on a wi-fi network?
I'm just "this guy", you know?
You don't already set your wi-fi routers to active countersurveillance doppler scrambling mode? All mine continuously inject few-Hz distortions into the transmissions that simulate a large crowd constantly milling about the house; distinguishing actual individuals is practically impossible. Heater wires in the walls to scramble thermal signatures help, too, and applying vibration transducers on all windows defeats laser microphone pickups with a constant background of random mixed voice fragments. Faraday cages on inner rooms is the only way to defeat more active scanning; but then the surveillors give away their presence, too. Remember, only *real* tinfoil works for EEG-blocking hats --- the aluminium stuff is a trick for the unwary.
Batman had that years ago...
Okay, I'm working on a report on my laptop while watching Sean Hannity. Sean says something annoying, I give him the finger - and then my laptop shuts down without saving my work!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
And here is one now:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
No brain, no pain.
According to TFA, this detects *movement* by Doppler shift in the wireless signal - yet it describes it as "similar to Xbox Kinect" but with a bunch of advantages.
However, Kinect doesn't just detect motion - it detects and reports skeletal position regardless of movement. Major differences in potential applications there (especially as the Kinect 2.0 has the resolution to detect finger position/movement as well) - probably not that great for most games.
One thing I can think of that this could be great for - home security. The current crappy IR motion sensors have to have semi-line of sight and (despite what they advertise) are NOT very pet-friendly (especially for large dogs). So, as long as it can tell the difference between a St. Bernard and a guy in a St. Bernard costume...
Gesturing hands over pastel multicolored panels? Keith Wilson is spinning in his grave! What are needed now are the cool-as-all-heck pulsating droning sounds like "reh-reh-reh-reh-reh/wehhhhhhnngooooowehhhhhhhnngooooo".
Continuum, S1 E7
/me puts tinfoil hat on wireless router.
"I've written new software that can use the wifi signals bouncing around in your home to help you change channels on your TV, or possibly give surreptitious surveillance to any law enorcement agency that can get a bullshit warrant from a rubber stamp judge. We promise it will only be used to help you change the TV channel."
Do programmers even filter this stuff through their conscience any more?
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Yes, we do. However, on the one hand, we come up with ways to make life (allegedly) easier and more entertaining. On the other hand, you have people who would gladly snoop by bouncing rocks off your house and listening to the echoes if they could et away with it. Bouncing light beams off glass windows to "hear" what was being said inside, in fact was a spy trick that probably dates back to the 1950's.
People with evil intent are with us always, and as far as I'm concerned, the most evil of the lot are the ones who do it because they're "the good guys". To them, inventors and programmers are just one more set of tools to be exploited.
It's great until your Italian grandmother comes by for a visit.
Proverbs 21:19
Neat, though I wonder about the privacy issues of its widespread use. If you can scan for a doppler frequency shift in the next room and record change over time, you could capture your neighbours position over time and render their movements on-screen.
Obligatory sci-fi reference: Continuum did something like this last year.
"These walls are solid Krell metal" said Dr. Morbeus. He waved his hand over the electrode and the walls slammed quickly into place.
-- Forbidden Planet
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
So this tech seems to use doppler shift of signals.
While I am sure some wifi hardware measures doppler shift to try to correct for it and get better reception in moving vehicles, none that I know of makes this info available to the driver, let alone exposes it to any program running on the router/laptop/phone.
So how does this work?
If my whole house started doing such as a requisite for simply getting bloody internet access, I would officially flip the fark out - sell off everything I own, and move to Costa Rica where I'd spend the rest of my days drinking whiskey from a coconut, while sitting on the beach in Punta Uva. Which really, sounds like a win, but my wife said she won't let me unless I legit go insane...and damnit, she knows.
Sidebars aside, sucks that some companies make their interfaces go such directions. Somewhat like back when it became impossible to find a cell phone which was only a cell phone and had no camera, I fear much will continue going down the route of touch and gestures...things which I, alas, can't do with finesse. (is this where I tell you punk kids to get off my lawn?)
Really, there needs to be something that distinguishes accidental gestures with legitimate ones. Most likely, people will just use voice recognition to activate controls, with physical gestures for fine tweaks.
Me: "Computer, I want to dim the lights."
Computer: "How much??"
Me: Spreads hands apart as the lights dim, till I'm satisfied.
Or maybe I'll just be happy to state that I want the lights dimmed by X percent. Maybe I'll get used to that and find that hand gestures suck.
All this article shows is that we'll have whole-home gesture recognition sooner, rather than later. The usability of such a system still needs work.
How long before they can "see" what people are doing inside their homes by reconstructing movement and position data through listening in on the electric cables down the street? Tin foil, anyone?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Yes, it will be so convenient to have 'remote control' of your media devices just by waving your arms in the air, unfortunately that same technology will end forever any sort of 'freedom', this will bring our wretched society into the total surveillance state.
No one remembers this from Isaac Asimov's Robots of Dawn? Seriously?
- No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades really cramps his style.
Clap on. Clap off. The Clapper.
but 2.4 GHz into 299,792,458 m/s is about 12 cm, probably too long to recognize my middle finger.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
Been done. Being done. move along.
A laptop in a busy coffeehouse would give you a nice reference signal on where to focus for finger movements in relation to the built in wlan card. If you know the laptop model you should be able to work out the key presses
This actually sends chills down my spine. Like, literally. This is only a few steps away from any Tom-Dick-or-Harry being able to see through every wall around them. Police surveillance? Military reconnaissance? Peeping on the neighbors?
And just like those infrared camcorders that were abruptly pulled from shelves, after people started using them for more than just "bird watching"... there is an absolute guarantee that this technology will be abused. Nothing you do in your own home or anywhere else will be beyond observation. Nothing.
Now, where did I put that tin-foil hat? ...
I was thinking, it might be nice to have an object to wave, perhaps in a wand shape, to increase the accuracy of gesture recognition. And maybe you could speak a command while you're doing it - special Latin or nonsense words, so it doesn't get confused with normal English conversation.
Wait, where have I seen that before...
Just wondering... :D
- *swipe in the air*
- *SLAP* (Computer voice:) Don't you put your finger in my v-ass ever again!
but 2.4 GHz into 299,792,458 m/s is about 12 cm, probably too long to recognize my middle finger.
That isn't quite right, as the dielectric constant of your finger is close to that of water (81), so the wavelength in your finger would actually be about 12 cm / sqrt(81) or a bit over 1 cm, and thus your finger might still be useful...
Having a 3 Stooges slap-fest should get an interesting strobe-light effect...