MIT Develops "Kinect of the Future" 76
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.'"
military applications (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
through a wall with simple structure, maybe (Score:4, Interesting)
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.