“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.”

    • Mossy Feathers (They/Them)@pawb.social
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      8 months ago

      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.

      Edit: considering wifi is just photons that aren’t wiggling fast enough for us to see, I’d be surprised if the government doesn’t already have this technology behind closed doors.

      • CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        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.

    • assassinatedbyCIA@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      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.

    • herrvogel@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      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.

  • sundray@lemmus.org
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    8 months ago

    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.)

  • Agent641@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    You know what else let’s you see through walls? Windows. (Suck it, Linux users!)

    • MNByChoice@midwest.social
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      8 months ago

      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.)

      • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        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.

        • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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          8 months ago

          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.

      • DdCno1@kbin.social
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        8 months ago

        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.

  • Atelopus-zeteki@kbin.run
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    8 months ago

    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/2301.00250

    Here’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

  • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    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.

    • Milkyway@feddit.de
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      8 months ago

      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.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        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.

    • deafboy@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Full body vr tracking without sensors?

      The human presence sensors based on this are already on the consumer market, we just need to dial up the sensitivity.

  • Xavier@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    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.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Here’s what they’re putting in the goggles that Infantrymen wear now.

      I don’t care to guess what the drones are packing.

      • Shurimal@kbin.social
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        8 months ago

        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.

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          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.

  • Dog@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    If I didn’t have a reason for why Ethernet is superior, I have one now!

      • reflex@kbin.social
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        8 months ago

        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.

  • mryessir@lemmy.sdf.org
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    8 months ago

    Doesn’t this mean the matrix film was right with their visualization (regardless of orientation)?

    • Chozo@kbin.social
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      8 months ago

      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.