It is now on Techmeme, too: http://www.techmeme.com/130605/p19#a130605p19
What is is, why do I care?
Or are you just spamming?
Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home
21–30 of 81 posts
Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home
#22Oh the possibilities of this - may be with enough data - you can just wander around a suburb and figure out which houses are currently occupied and which ones are not. - improve aged care by monitoring walking patterns - combine it with some more ingenious technology for localised sound -- you can beam music as I walk around the house (or block out sounds)? - a bit more sensitivity and we can even probably pick up a…
It seems easy enough to reduce leakage or fuzz the signal.
I don't have the background to try to pull the limits up out of the white paper, but I think the current implementation is more or less looking for movement in 1 dimension (towards and away from the receiver). So plenty of time to decide whether radio waves are revealing anything that sight and sound are not.
Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home
#23This sounds a lot like the mobile phone sonar that Batman used in the Dark Knight which seemed utterly ridiculous to me and many others at the time:
http://sfblunders.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/dark-knight-sonar...
Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home
#24Could be useful in prisons to keep tabs on the general population without having to use cameras.
Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home
#25Oh the possibilities of this - may be with enough data - you can just wander around a suburb and figure out which houses are currently occupied and which ones are not. - improve aged care by monitoring walking patterns - combine it with some more ingenious technology for localised sound -- you can beam music as I walk around the house (or block out sounds)? - a bit more sensitivity and we can even probably pick up a…
And maybe predict domestic violence before it happens.
I'm not sure if I qualify as one of the "privacy folk" or not, but I would say "As long as the police cannot compel you to install the thing and switch it on, or have an AI system issue search warrants in seconds based on what the machine reports." Unfortunately I think we will have both of those things 20 years from now.
Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's going to happen anyway.
probably not, home automation has been "right around the corner" for 60 years.
Home automation exists and is cheap. There's a huge niche industry built around it. The problem is that people don't actually want it as much as they say they do. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home
#27Can this differentiate between multiple humans gesturing at the same time (intentional or otherwise)?
What about pets moving around or turning the shower on?
Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home
#28Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
probably not, home automation has been "right around the corner" for 60 years.
Home automation exists and is cheap. There's a huge niche industry built around it. The problem is that people don't actually want it as much as they say they do. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I think they are still a bit too expensive for people. You can either get a whole system for several dozen kUSD, or single elements (e.g. smart outlets) for ~$100 each. The former is a significant expense people might not want to pay at once when buying homes, and the latter is a bit too expensive to buy one by one, because you require to have at least few of those devices before the system starts to get useful.
Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home
#30Oh the possibilities of this - may be with enough data - you can just wander around a suburb and figure out which houses are currently occupied and which ones are not. - improve aged care by monitoring walking patterns - combine it with some more ingenious technology for localised sound -- you can beam music as I walk around the house (or block out sounds)? - a bit more sensitivity and we can even probably pick up a…
And maybe predict domestic violence before it happens. I'm not sure if I qualify as one of the "privacy folk" or not, but I would say "As long as the police cannot compel you to install the thing and switch it on, or have an AI system issue search warrants in seconds based on what the machine reports." Unfortunately I think we will have both of those things 20 years from now.
An AI system issuing warrants defeats the entire purpose of warrants. The entire purpose is to put human oversight into the system.
Whether you consider this a fatal objection to the idea or a problem to be solved is an exercise for the reader. (The future is weird.)