this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
466 points (96.4% liked)
Technology
59314 readers
4817 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm an EE, and I have serious doubt about this actually working nearly as good as they are putting it. This sort of stuff is hard, even with purpose built radar systems. I'm working with angle estimation in Multipath environments, and that shit fucks your signals up. This may work it you have extremely precisely characterised the target room and walls, and a ton of stuff around it, and then don't change anything but the motion of the people. But that's not practical.
You are correct, at best this requires some a priori knowledge of the room. You can kind of do basic motion detection blindly though. They are just measuring the channel response via the 802.11 preambles, so for basic presence detection knowing that the channel response is changing is enough.
It's Popular Mechanics, of course it doesn't work as well as they say it does. But the theory has been around a long time.
I was under the impression these experiments required a pre mapped room with EM readings. I don't think they can watch you like if it was an X-ray but I'd believe it if they could track blobs of moving mass.