Wi-Fi Signals Enable Gesture Recognition throughout Entire Home !

Forget to turn off the lights before leaving the apartment? No problem. Just raise your hand, finger-swipe the air, and your lights will power down. Want to change the song playing on your music system in the other room? Move your hand to the right and flip through the songs.

University of Washington computer scientists have developed gesture-recognition technology that brings this a step closer to reality. Researchers have shown it's possible to leverage Wi-Fi signals around us to detect specific movements without needing sensors on the human body or cameras.

By using an adapted Wi-Fi router and a few wireless devices in the living room, users could control their electronics and household appliances from any room in the home with a simple gesture.

"This is repurposing wireless signals that already exist in new ways," said lead researcher Shyam Gollakota, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. "You can actually use wireless for gesture recognition without needing to deploy more sensors."

The UW research team that includes Shwetak Patel, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering and of electrical engineering and his lab, published their findings online this week. This technology, which they call "WiSee," has been submitted to The 19th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking.

The concept is similar to Xbox Kinect -- a commercial product that uses cameras to recognize gestures -- but the UW technology is simpler, cheaper and doesn't require users to be in the same room as the device they want to control. That's because Wi-Fi signals can travel through walls and aren't bound by line-of-sight or sound restrictions.

The UW researchers built a "smart" receiver device that essentially listens to all of the wireless transmissions coming from devices throughout a home, including smartphones, laptops and tablets. A standard Wi-Fi router could be adapted to function as a receiver.

When a person moves, there is a slight change in the frequency of the wireless signal. Moving a hand or foot causes the receiver to detect a pattern of changes known as the Doppler frequency shift.

These frequency changes are very small -- only several hertz -- when compared with Wi-Fi signals that have a 20 megahertz bandwidth and operate at 5 gigahertz. Researchers developed an algorithm to detect these slight shifts. The technology also accounts for gaps in wireless signals when devices aren't transmitting.

The technology can identify nine different whole-body gestures, ranging from pushing, pulling and punching to full-body bowling. The researchers tested these gestures with five users in a two-bedroom apartment and an office environment. Out of the 900 gestures performed, WiSee accurately classified 94 percent of them.

"This is the first whole-home gesture recognition system that works without either requiring instrumentation of the user with sensors or deploying cameras in every room," said Qifan Pu, a collaborator and visiting student at the UW.

The system requires one receiver with multiple antennas. Intuitively, each antenna tunes into a specific user's movements, so as many as five people can move simultaneously in the same residence without confusing the receiver.

If a person wants to use the WiSee, she would perform a specific repetition gesture sequence to get access to the receiver. This password concept would also keep the system secure and prevent a neighbor -- or hacker -- from controlling a device in your home.

Once the wireless receiver locks onto the user, she can perform normal gestures to interact with the devices and appliances in her home. The receiver would be programmed to understand that a specific gesture corresponds to a specific device.

Collaborators Patel and Sidhant Gupta, a doctoral student in computer science and engineering, have worked with Microsoft Research on two similar technologies -- SoundWave, which uses sound, and Humantenna, which uses radiation from electrical wires -- that both sense whole-body gestures. But WiSee stands apart because it doesn't require the user to be in the same room as the receiver or the device.

In this way, a smart home could become a reality, allowing you to turn off the oven timer with a simple wave of the hand, or turn on the coffeemaker from your bed.

The researchers plan to look next at the ability to control multiple devices at once. The initial work was funded by the UW department of computer science and engineering.

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Volvo designs magnetic roads for cheaper, simpler self-driving cars

There are myriad visions for a future filled with self-driving cars. For example, there’s Google’s experimental driverless car bristling with sensors, as well as more modest systems that would only take over from drivers for short periods. The problem with more ambitious self-driving car technologies is the considerably higher cost, whether in public infrastructure (networked roads) or the smarts built into the vehicles themselves. Volvo thinks it has an idea that could make self-driving cars work with much less hassle. All we need is a bunch of magnets embedded in the road.

Volvo began developing its magnet-based smart car system after looking long and hard at the other proposals on the table. It’s not just the cost of advanced sensors, cameras, GPS, and LIDAR that make self-driving cars tricky, the reliability is also questionable. Electronic solutions are more prone to failure in general, but even more so when inclement weather strikes. A magnet? Well, that’s always a magnet, and it can be paired with other automated technologies to make a fully driverless car.

In order to test the idea of using magnetic roadways, Volvo actually built a 100-meter test track in Hällered, Sweden and raced a specially modified S60 down it at over 90 mph. Engineers lined the road with neodymium magnets (20mm x 10mm) and ferrite magnets (30mm x 5mm) in lines down the edges and middle of the lane. The company tested both embedded and surface installation, finding that magnets on the surface would be effective and easier to install. Although, either option is sure to cause headaches in the case of roadwork.

Magnetic sensors are nothing new, but at the speeds we busy humans often need to drive, existing hardware wasn’t sensitive or fast enough. Volvo engineers calculated a car would require at least 400 magnetic samples per second to remain on the straight and narrow — a regular magnetic sensor can only do about three readings per second, and even then only when it is within a few centimeters of the magnet. So Volvo decided to roll its own magnetic sensor rig with five sensor modules, each with 15 smaller Honeywell magnetic sensor pods. This rig was attached to the bottom of the car and was able to pull in 500 readings per second.

The system was able to monitor the car’s location to within 10 cm at 45 mph when telemetry factors such as speed and acceleration were figured in. You’d probably want the precision to be a little higher before taking your hands off the wheel, but you get a lot for your money here. The advanced sensor package on Google’s self-driving car has about $150,000 worth of sensors, but Volvo estimates its magnetic sensor package will add only $109 to the cost of a car when produced in large quantities. Volvo also claims installing magnets in typical two-lane roadways would cost an average of $24,405 per kilometer. If that sounds like a lot, it’s not actually bad in the context of self-driving technology. Of course, you could only use this system where the magnets had been laid down — Google’s car works almost anywhere right now.

As the technology for self-driving cars becomes a reality, we need to ask ourselves how smart the cars should be. Expensive sensor packages are great for completely controlling a vehicle so you can take a nap, but only in good conditions. A bit of ice or some fog could make things awfully sketchy. If we rely on magnets in the road (or some other passive tech) everything is more reliable, but possibly not as convenient. A networked on-board systemcan respond to traffic dynamically and provide detailed analytics. Magnets — they just keep you on the road. However, it might end up being more important to focus on what’s feasible than what’s clever in the end. Magnets could end up as part of a more advanced system that at least has a basic fallback mode when things go wrong.

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Sony’s Project Morpheus prototype is a hit, bodes well for the future of virtual reality

 

In the days since the Project Morpheus announcement, the internet has been abuzz with excitement. Sony’s new VR helmet for the PS4 is receiving substantial mainstream coverage and a surprising amount of praise from the gaming and technology community. Sony is knocking it out of the park with Project Morpheus, and we’re all going to benefit from it.

Sony is running live demos of Project Morpheus at GDC (Game Developers Conference) this week, and our sister site IGN was lucky enough to get some hands-on time with the prototype. On the whole, this early model is definitely delivering on the promise of VR. Sure, there is still a bit of motion blur introduced during quick head movements, but everything else seems solid as a rock. The headset is comfortable, the demo software performed well, the stereoscopic effect is seamless, and the head-tracking even works facing away from the camera. Even after months of experience with the Oculus Rift, the IGN staff walked away very impressed with Morpheus.

The acclaim reaches far and wide, and even die-hard Oculus fans are pleased with Sony’s hardware. Polygon’s Ben Kuchera is a noted Oculus Rift enthusiast, and he says that Sony is “onto something special” with Project Morpheus. From fan sites to international news outlets, the tone is almost exclusively positive. It’s possible that this exuberance is due to the PS4′s halo effect, but we won’t know if Sony has actually caught lightning in a bottle until consumers have to lay down cash for this peripheral.

So, what about all the hard work the Oculus Rift team has put in? Is the Rift going to be left by the wayside in favor of the Sony juggernaut? Fear not! Project Morpheus is undoubtedly a boon for the Oculus Rift. First of all, Sony’s headset is only intended to work with the PS4. PC gamers will need a headset of their very own, and the Oculus Rift is primed to play that role. Secondly, a rising tide lifts all boats. Having the Sony marketing team get the word out to the masses about modern VR gaming is exactly what the Oculus Rift team needs. Sony’s announcement helps to legitimize VR gaming in a big way, and that is good for us all.

It’s still early days for VR, but it seems like it’s an idea whose time has come. It’s safe to assume that both Microsoft and Nintendo are feverishly researching their own VR solutions, and the Oculus Rift team is most assuredly interested in partnering with a major company to bring the Rift to the living room. Virtual reality is quickly gaining mindshare, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s on the shelves of every major retailer.

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