Scientists use Wi-Fi to see through walls, create 3D holograms

Do you remember the movie “The Dark Knight”? Geeks all over the world were excited to see Bruce Wayne’s Batman take on the protagonist with a SONAR-based 3D holographic map, which he ultimately destroys at the end of the film. The world has looked forward to the tech becoming a reality since then. And, it seems that the time has finally come to get a 3D holographic real-time interface.

A recent journal in the Physical review of Letters documents that a pair of German scientists has found a way to use Wi-Fi routers to create 3D holographic images of objects around a network. The method uses Wi-Fi signals to scan a room. Transmitting devices, such as phones, act as light bulbs for the imaging system. It depends on two antennas: one scanner maps a 2D plane and another one only records the signal. Once the image data is collected, it is fed into the computer algorithm to create a holographic image of the object in space.

The tech utilises stray radiations from radio wave-emitting devices like Wi-Fi routers, cell phones, laptops and any other device that emit electromagnetic radiations. These signals bounce off reflective surfaces like walls, tables, appliances and similar stuff to reach back the router, like an invisible electromagnetic light bulb, thus providing loads of tracking data all the time. A clever computer programme is needed to create the holographic image of an object, which is what the scientists have created.

The system is currently in its infancy, which means that it is not possible to detect and create accurate shapes of objects. "If there's a cup of coffee on a table, you may see something is there, but you couldn't see the shape," says Philipp Holl, a 23-year-old undergraduate physics student at the Technical University of Munich. "But you could make out the shape of a person, or a dog on a couch. Really any object that's more than four centimetres in size," he added while interviewed by Business Insider.

The benefits of a system like this could be immensely helpful to emergency rescue teams while rescuing people in the event of an earthquake, a plane crash or even terrorist operations by the army. Such a system could also be of major help to the building industry, game developers and AR/VR developers as well.

(SOURCE)