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mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

joshhorne.com

141–150 of 192 posts

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#141
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to come and say the same thing. Its perfectly possible to create feature descriptors for 60gig radar, and use it to image rooms, things and possibly people. Its a privacy problem we currently are trying to overcome in AR. The problem is that because feature descriptors are so small, researchers assume that they don't contain PII. So its going to take a scandal before its taken seriously. Given that most o…

Not to the same degree but roomba seemed to survive mapping peoples houses privacy problems, and everyone seems to love Alexa. The general public prefers features over privacy.

They certainly do, up to the point when they start to see the downsides.

Facebook for example. It took a few years, but people are now wary of information being grabbed by them.

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#142
post #107

> mmWave radar used inside the cabin as a sensor to detect a child left behind in a hot car Call me a cynic but since the power button stopped being a power button I have trust issues. In the end we'll have mmWave chips our company devices that can tell middle managers if we've been at our desk for all 28,800 seconds of the work day and exactly how hard we've been working, that's a more likely outcome than saving a k…

You could do that today with normal tech today. That's why you need laws in place that prohibit work place monitoring.

You could argue that today's circumstance is why you DON'T need explicit laws prohibiting workplace monitoring.

Anyone with the desire could set up such systems today. But they don't. Because they're expensive, inaccurate, and ultimately not all that useful in the social context. There are places that do employ such monitoring, but they're a corner case.

Trust is a core commodity in the workplace. It's usually more profitable to establish a trustworthy workgroup to accomplish some goal than it is to accomplish some goal WHILE monitoring the workgroup's every move for infractions.

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#143

> Because mmWave radar doesn’t process visual light, what it sees is not personally identifiable. With machine learning improvements, identification and more are possible. From a 2021 paper on IEEE 802.11bf Wi-Fi Sensing, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.14918.pdf > Indeed, it has been shown that SENS-based classifiers can infer privacy-critical information such as keyboard typing, gesture recognition and activity tracking…

Yeah. Up front they say:

> what it sees is not personally identifiable

Then later on in the article:

> [the new HomePod could] [detect] the user's identity based on their gait, height, and physical profile

Uh-huh.

…did they read their own article?

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#144
post #55
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the power consumption? Is it sensitive to noise or interference? The VR headset application appeals to me. If headsets could be dumb terminals they would be a lot lighter and untethered wouldn't suffer from performance loss.

Power consumption for radar can get down to around 0.5mW (edit) But I imagine for 60GHz WiFi it's probably pretty power hungry. At this point there's not much noise in the mmWave spectrum (it won't be competing with 2.4GHz and 5GHz anyways). And mmWave doesn't travel that far which is one of the main reasons the FCC unlicensed it in the first place. Might be worth keeping an eye on UWB for AR/VR headsets https://www.…

Checking some point to point wireless radios and it doesn't look like 60Ghz needs much more power. Well, it might be a few times as much, but definitely the same order of magnitude.

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#145

Very dumb question: If mmWave is operating at 60GHz, how would it be possible for processors (which are operating at less than 1/10th of that clock rate) to process that sampling rate?

The other comments are good answers to your question, but here's a fun little fact: if you actually want to directly read a 60Ghz signal, you actually need to sample it at 120Ghz to get it all! Good old nyquist.

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#146

I've been waiting for someone to finally make a consumer stud finder that works and this just might finally happen after this deregulation of the spectrum. The construction industry would hand over wheelbarrows full of money for a BLE phone-paired puck that located studs and pipes behind drywall. Someone could even sell a "pro" version that combined the data from multiple pucks to render a 3D point cloud of the insid…

Would the Walabot fit the bill for you? I bought one when it first came out and seemed pretty good. I haven't messed with it in a couple years though. https://walabot.com/see-through-walls This seems like a pretty good review: https://www.bobvila.com/articles/walabot-stud-finder/

I tried one and it's pretty disappointing. Plenty of room for improvement.

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#147

I've been waiting for someone to finally make a consumer stud finder that works and this just might finally happen after this deregulation of the spectrum. The construction industry would hand over wheelbarrows full of money for a BLE phone-paired puck that located studs and pipes behind drywall. Someone could even sell a "pro" version that combined the data from multiple pucks to render a 3D point cloud of the insid…

Yes, this would be incredible.

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#148

> mmWave radar doesn’t process visual light, what it sees is not personally identifiable that is not how "personally identifiable" works as long as you can (re-)identify a person with it it's personally identifiable data. Even if identification is done by using a mmWave radar and some simple ML.

Using radars with only distance and relative speeds data, no direction at all, to identify equipment has a long history in the military.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_MASINT#Non-Cooperative_T...

Humans come in greater variety than airplanes but recognition, especially with things like gait analysis, should be quite possible. Now, I'm skeptical that a photo of a person contains enough information to allow for mmWave recognition though, but I'd assume video does.

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#149

Do any of you see avenues for a conventional radar company to contribute to this emerging trend? We produce high-end FMCW radars ( http://dopplerradars.com ) and I have been looking for ways to align us more with Tech and less with Defense.

Presence detection. Make a $50 device I can run on a battery/Power over Ethernet/etc.

Make it all locally manageable, and make it work with HomeAssistant, so I don't have to deal with it "calling home" or shipping data outside my LAN.

I'm not a huge fan of the current crop of presence detection, and mmWave seems like just the thing. Eventually, person detection would be fantastic, but it MUST NOT call home outside the LAN. I don't want that junk going on the internet in any way, shape, or fashion.

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#150

Do any of you see avenues for a conventional radar company to contribute to this emerging trend? We produce high-end FMCW radars ( http://dopplerradars.com ) and I have been looking for ways to align us more with Tech and less with Defense.

As a guy that works on old cars (and drives them fast) that will never have OEM support for e.g. ADAS, I'd love to have access to a small, discreet (i.e. not visually excessive, but "hideable"), modular set of sensors that could be used to build e.g. ADAS/parking sensors/(pipe dream) automated driving.

I'm sure the OEMs would be interested, but I'm looking for something I can retrofit.

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