“We developed a deep neural network that maps the phase and amplitude of WiFi signals to UV coordinates within 24 human regions. The results of the study reveal that our model can estimate the dense pose of multiple subjects, with comparable performance to image-based approaches, by utilizing WiFi signals as the only input.”
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.
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.
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.
I mean you can look through my walls if you want, but don’t come crying to me if you don’t like what you see.
(I’m painting fantasy miniatures. They’re for a friend.)
Same, but the fantasy miniatures are sex toys and the paint is my butt.
A good hobby is a wonderful thing, indeed!
You give your used toys to your friend? Must be a close relationship
That’s what a bro is for.
Yeah, if they help with painting they can have some too
You know what else let’s you see through walls? Windows. (Suck it, Linux users!)
In more than one sense, yes.
Applicable nick there…
Lead paint coming back into fashion.
I lick that 👍
paint myself in lead paint to become invisible. got it. /s
“we threw a deep neural network at the wall to see if it sticks”
Lets hope the government is transparent about its use of this technology.
All the information you want to know is available at: REDACTED
Article is from a year ago. Government tends to be ahead of the curve. As an uninformed guess, they have been using it in high value situations for 4+ years.
(Dear FBI, the above is a guess based on public information. I don’t know shit.)
Government tends to be ahead of the curve.
I dunno what world you’re living in, but I live in a world where police still do nearly all their work with pencil and paper and if you want to talk to a police officer, no you can’t talk to them on the phone or send an email. You’ll have to have a meeting face to face.
Sorry, I don’t mean the police.
Actually, police do tend to be reasonably ahead when technology is invasive. I’ve heard many stories about them seeing through walls with other technology. They also tend to like face-tracking, which is pretty advanced. They just are really far behind on technology that could be used to hold them accountable.
Israel has been using a similar system since at least 2022:
https://petapixel.com/2022/06/29/the-xaver-1000-sees-through-walls-and-is-made-for-the-israeli-army/
It’s pretty likely that they have shared this system with their closest allies, similar to how the Trophy missile defense system found its way onto German and American tanks.
By the way, those throwable cameras mentioned at the end of the article have been available to the IDF since 2005.
Time to plaster your outer walls with fine wire mesh.
Which leads to the obvious question: how long has the military been able to do this?
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
TEMPEST is a U. S. National Security Agency specification and a NATO certification referring to spying on information systems through leaking emanations, including unintentional radio or electrical signals, sounds, and vibrations. TEMPEST covers both methods to spy upon others and how to shield equipment against such spying. The protection efforts are also known as emission security (EMSEC), which is a subset of communications security (COMSEC).
Good bot (does this work here?)
Not yet
wdym by “does this work here?”
There was an incredibly annoying and useless bot on Reddit that ranked other bots based on comments like that.
Umm, article from Jan 19, 2023. I remember seeing it then. Is there anything new on this?
The paper: [Submitted on 31 Dec 2022] - I’m not sure if it’s out of prepublication yet.
DensePose From WiFi - https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00250Here’s another tidbit from July 2, 2023 DensePose from WiFi - See through the walls. - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/densepose-from-wifi-see-through-walls-alejandro-fernández
And another from July 25, 2023 Revolutionary Applications of DensePose From WiFi: Enhancing Corporate Security and Empowering Military Tactical Teams - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/revolutionary-applications-densepose-from-wifi-enhancing-zack-hamm
Here’s a video summary of the paper I thought did a good job too from two minute papers.
Thank you for the vid link, got a new channel subscribed now. Great starting point to show people and dive down the rabbit hole with.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/kBFMsY5ZP0o
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Duh? I don’t think anyone with the right field of study thought this wasn’t possible. It just doesn’t have good use cases.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If I didn’t have a reason for why Ethernet is superior, I have one now!
… that you CANT see through walls? Seems like a downgrade to me…
Hey, I don’t want IRL wallhacks 😭
Wasn’t this the plot point of The Dark Knight?
And everyone thinks Batman was the good guy.
starts putting paint on face
The whole point of that scene was that he was overstepping the line.
But then cops wear Punisher logos and Republicans play Born in the USA at election rallies, so who knows how the masses interpreted it…
That’s just another example of why Batman was literally evil.
Yes, but he specifically used cell signals.
We only have to enter his name to be safe.Came here to say this!
Henceforth, the building code shall make mandatory that every room be perfectly grounded Faraday cages (/s).
Still, imagine lethal drones integrated with that technology (of course, they already have infrared, maybe even some adequate wavelength of X-rays).
Nevertheless, pretty cool to see how far we can take preexisting technology with the help of some deep learning layers.
Here’s what they’re putting in the goggles that Infantrymen wear now.
I don’t care to guess what the drones are packing.
What we know about drones is that they have cameras that can discern individuals from 10 km altitude.
What we suspect is that US has Hubble-sized spy satellites that can do almost the same. There were a lot of classified military STS missions.
What is theoretically possible is that US drones and spy sats can function as very large arrays (we do this with astronomical telescopes already) to dramatically increase spatial resolution.
I’d believe it. When I was in the infantry 20 years ago we could see you 3km away with the optics mounted on our machineguns. And several kilometers with cameras mounted on towers. I don’t know how far they went but it was at least 5km because we were directing mortar fire with them and that’s about the range of the mortar system we were using.
Oh I wonder if that’s how the Pic was taken that trump tweeted out of that rocket launch site, people didn’t think it was physically possible for a satellite to have that resolution
It all comes down to the size of the mirror/lense—the bigger, the better. Up to a point. The biggest problem is air currents and different air densities refracting light and distorting the image. That’s what these laser beams are for on photos taken of astronomical observatories—they give reference light spot that can be used to calibrate adaptive optics to current atmospheric conditions reducing distortion.
Based on the cell phone reception in my house, I already suspect it’s a Faraday cage.
near future building insulation will include enhanced EM spectrum insulation, to prevent or distort leakage into the environment
Add a ! at the start to embed images.
Add a ! at the start to embed images.
Yep, I always do that, but my understanding is that functionality is broken on kbin, or otherwise isn’t working as expected.
Sadly lots of features are not working on kbin, or less specifically various services in the fediverse. One example is spoilers. Last I checked there is no consistent spoiler syntax that works across the fediverse, and so spoilers are dangerous territory. Hell, even some apps don’t handle spoilers appropriately just for Lemmy.
This article is a year old. Do we have posting standards in here?
The tech is even far older than the article. I remember seeing this being demo’d at least a decade ago. Though, it looks like the fidelity has improved significantly from the early proof-of-concept videos that were floating around for a while.
Sorry, I didn’t notice the date when I posted. I can take it down if requested.
Nah, you’re good. For some of us it’s the first time seeing it, and I really liked reading what people far more familiar with this tech have to say about it here, including that it’s old news for them. So thank you, seriously, for posting it.
