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MIT Develops "Kinect of the Future"
itwbennett writes "Using radio signals, MIT researchers can pinpoint someone's location — through a wall — with accuracy of +/- 10 centimeters. Fadel Adib, a Ph.D student on the project, said that gaming could be one use for the technology, but that localization is also very important. He said that Wi-Fi localization, or determining someone's position based on Wi-Fi, typically requires the user to hold a transmitter, like a smartphone for example. 'What we're doing here is localization through a wall without requiring you to hold any transmitter or receiver [and] simply by using reflections off a human body,' he said. 'What is impressive is that our accuracy is higher than even state of the art Wi-Fi localization.'"
I am sure if you can easily pinpoint humans through a wall with 10 cm accuracy, you will see this funded and developed by your favourite defense contractors. Sniper rifle with wallhack, anyone?
>Using radio signals, MIT researchers can pinpoint someone's location — through a wall — with accuracy of +/- 10 centimeters. Fadel Adib, a Ph.D student on the project, said that gaming could be one use for the technology,
I suspect killing people will be higher on the list of priorities of certain funding bodies.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Yes, people have been doing "radar through walls" with all manner of signals for decades.
Here's the problem.. works fine on a simple homogenous wall: the wall looks like a sheet of glass to the radar.
Now, what if that wall is more like pebble or frosted glass? Or say, glass blocks (which is what standard concrete blocks or bricks look like at microwave frequencies.
What if the house were a "hall of mirrors" since the walls can reflect microwave signals, and some goes through. What about furniture?
Sure, one *could* with enough measurements and computation figure all this stuff out (it's called an inversion problem), and then calculate what's actually going on.
Detecting the reflections is the easy part. We've all done that with over the air TV back in rabbit ear days. Turning that into an image is substantially more challenging.
Using radio waves to track position/movement is VERY far from new. Even imaging through walls is extremely old hat. A control interface with 10cm+/- resolution would be drastically worse than any current game controller.
This isn't for gaming - it's use would be primarily for surveillance and automated 'security' tools of various kinds. It's not Xbox - its NSA/military/creepy 'spy' tools.
Ryan Fenton
Yeah, getting that genie back in the bottle will surely be successful. Right.
Free Martian Whores!
As a counter measure, I was wondering: can this be stopped by designing the right wall?
If you make a wall that scatters a lot back due to a non-homogenous constitution or imperfections, will there be enough reflections to make the system useless? And is that a universal flaw (i.e no matter what type of radar you build, a single "well designed" wall can thwart all such systems)? Or does the wall need to be designed specific to the frequency/design of the detector?
The reason I ask is that I consider this is likely to be an invasion of privacy - "we didn't need a warrant to track the subject, the neighbor was a perv. who had the scanner, and came forward (and we aren't filing charges against him for $unrelated_crime)." It would be nice if a low-tech solution can thwart this.
this story is sort of a dupe minus the (puzzing) gaming angle http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/06/29/138230/mit-researchers-can-see-through-walls-using-wi-fi
Or maybe some people just wanted to do some cool fucking research. Everything isn't about the damn NSA and spying - and I know this is hard to swallow - but some people like engineering cool gadgets, solving new puzzles, and pushing the boundaries of knowledge and technology.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
If your neighbor is hot, passive IR imaging might be the way to go here.
Have gnu, will travel.
This was classified in 1,2,3 ... in 1941, 1942, 1943.
Since then, radar has been declassified.
Slashdot editors: Please add a few lines in the summary to trigger interest for futue inserts.
Currently this one just says "researchers at MIT built a radar" - and what is the news in that?
In the editors' defence the article doesn't say that much more, either.
I wonder if the people researching this stuff ever think of the real life implications of the technology. Do they really want a world where they have no privacy even inside their own home or bedroom? not to mention all the people this tech will enable military and police to more easily kill.
I wish I could have a reaction of "oh wow that's pretty cool" but instead it's just depressing. I don't want to go back to the dark ages but I no longer really get enthusiastic with the way technology is moving these days. it's all about making a colder more controlled and confined world where every day people are being made irrelevant and obsolete.
There is no utopia coming where people don't have to work. If you do not produce wealth in some fashion you will be thrown into the dust bin of history to starve to death and quietly die on a street corner somewhere. automation is not going to be your savior. What are we going to do when 90% of the population is unemployable due to the advancement of automation and robotics. What will life be like in that new dystopia where everything you do is fully controlled and monitored by machines in a police state that even George Orwell could never even begin to imagine?
I wonder if anyone even asks these questions anymore I feel like we are running full speed off the side of a cliff and anyone that think's that is not such a great idea is just scoffed at. Technology should be about serving humanity and making it better not about controlling and enslaving us.