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Scientists Use WiFi to See Through People's Walls
(www.popularmechanics.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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Absolutely ludicrous to paint this development as anything but the wet dream of both a burglar and a police state.
Also VR nerds. Current tracking is either based on the headset, so you can't move your arms unless the headset can see them, or your arms have to be seen by lighthouses, or you rely purely on gyroscope and accelerometers for tracking, which tend to drift. So either you have blind spots, have to deal with occlusion, or will slowly drift and have to recalibrate periodically. Wifi-based tracking seems like a neat idea tbh.
Edit: considering wifi is just photons that aren't wiggling fast enough for us to see, I'd be surprised if the government doesn't already have this technology behind closed doors.
For VR I don’t see why we wouldn’t use a variety of other technologies before we ever use WiFi. The main issue with the WiFi thing is going to be polling rates and interference (which limits polling rates). They’re also using a neural net here which requires both processing power and time so there’s latency far beyond VR uses. That’s without talking about tracking that would be needed for higher spatial resolution which this also doesn’t have currently. So it’s not impossible to use this, just not currently practical or even close.
The real solve to that stuff is just an improvement on existing tech or maybe Lidar. With the progress that has been made on the Quest with hand tracking, I’d bet their next goal is body and face tracking so you’ll see this soon.
As for the government having this, I doubt they really need to have it this specific to track poses or body parts. If you have a cell phone on you, they likely know exactly where you’re at in a room. If you don’t, I’m betting they have access to other important data. Motion detection, number of people, room shape and some contents, interference sources.
Home automation nerds would also cream their pants if they could get their hands on this. Imagine you could use your existing wifi router to detect presence in your home. Say goodbye to shitty IR sensors that forget about your existence within 3 seconds, no more finicky radar modules that are either too sensitive or not nearly sensitive enough.
I literally just have my machine ping my phone every ten seconds. Surprisingly effective presence detection.
How would one go about setting this up? Because that sounds really cool for home automation.
There is this Home Assistant integration which I remember getting working. I haven't used Home Assistant in a while though, so I can't be a good resource if you need any help.
It's a very crude way of detecting presence for a variety of reasons, and likely won't be as useful as you imagine.
The biggest problem is how modern smartphones handle networking when they're locked. They enter a power saving state where they don't respond to all pings, or they respond late enough that the pinger decides the device is just not there. Of course there are ways around it, but those are things you need to do explicitly so it won't work on all devices until you've taken the time to set it up.
And since it detects a mobile device's existence in the local wireless network rather than the actual presence of a human being, it's not very flexible at all. What if you want to detect the presence of a guest? Are you gonna make sure they're on your network with their devices set up to properly respond to pings? What if you forgot to turn on your phone's wifi after turning it off?
I mean it does work once you've set it up, but do expect it to have a very limited scope in what you can and cannot do with it.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be at all shocked if uncle sam and his favourite three letter agencies have been playing around with this tech for years.