
WiTrack – Through-Wall 3D Tracking Using Body Radio Reflections - wamatt
http://witrack.csail.mit.edu/
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mdisraeli
This development is pretty damn cool. At Electromagnetic Wave in London
earlier this year, I went to a talk held by someone working on similar
research, but using wifi signals. At that time, they didn't have the fidelity
of this proposed system.

Talking to other attendees of EMW, I voiced my scepticism of the need for this
over CCTV image analysis. My instinct was that a reasonable CCTV setup would
get you 80% of the way towards your goal. I bumped into someone with
professional experience at image & video analysis - turns out that the
limitations of video are such that this sort of remote monitoring would
actually give better quality data than camera feed analysis, at least if you
factor in the relative cost of installing adequate enough cameras.

The biggest use for a system like this probably isn't gaming, home automation,
or remote monitoring. Imagine instead knowing not where people are in a shop,
but roughly what they are looking at, how they are each moving, tracking it
all the way through to what they buy. Whilst there are lots of exciting
security uses for systems like this, shopping analytics is where there are
clear financial gains to be made (remember that investments to reduce costs
typically look for >20% savings, but when increasing revenue 2% can be a lot!)

Of course, the big question here is range, and how many simultaneous targets
this can track.

(and as a final note: now shrink this and give me my motion sensor alá Aliens
;) )

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gr3yh47
Couldn't this be used to watch peoples movements in a house from the street?

In any case with the NSA's ubiquitous tracking and ability to compromise
networked systems at will... this scares me and the privacy risks absolutely
outweigh any potential benefit

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Bjartr
Yes, but it would be covered by the same precedents as e.g. thermal imaging
tools, which is that a warrant is necessary for evidence gathered to be
admissible.

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gojomo
Similar to UW's WiSee:

[http://wisee.cs.washington.edu/](http://wisee.cs.washington.edu/)

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deefourd
not really, WiSee cannot get the position of the person/hand. It rather relies
on doppler, so it can only tell if someone (or his hand) is getting closer or
further away.

In fact, WiSee is more similar to WiVi (previous work by this group from MIT):
[http://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/wivi/](http://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/wivi/)

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ORioN63
I would like to know, how far from the market is this?

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jimmytidey
Be interested to know what kind of range it has...

