20 October 2013

Kinect of the Future

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed a device that can see through walls and pinpoint a person with incredible accuracy. They call it the ‘Kinect of the future’, after Microsoft's Xbox 360 motion sensing camera. The project from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Laboratory (CSAIL) used three radio antennas spaced about a meter apart and pointed at a wall. A desk cluttered with wires and circuits generated and interpreted the radio waves. On the other side of the wall a single person walked around the room and the system represented that person as a red dot on a computer screen. The system tracked the movements with an accuracy of plus or minus 10 centimeters, which is about the width of an adult hand.


In the room where users walked around there was white tape on the floor in a circular design. The tape on the floor was also in the virtual representation of the room on the computer screen. It wasn't being used an aid to the technology, rather it showed onlookers just how accurate the system was. As testers walked on the floor design their actions were mirrored on the computer screen. One of the drawbacks of the system is that it can only track one moving person at a time and the area around the project needs to be completely free of movement. That meant that when the group wanted to test the system they would need to leave the room with the transmitters as well as the surrounding area; only the person being tracked could be nearby.

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