Wi-Vi Uses WiFi Signals To Track Humans

Did you all watch ‘Man of steel’? Are you a die hard fan of superman, too? We bet you are! We all have, at one point, wanted the superpowers that he has.

Well, now we can.

Thanks to science and this technological era that is making everything possible! What we have is a technology that could soon be embedded into your smart phone and voila, you can see behind walls. Say hello to ‘Wi-Vi’ a proud invention of MIT professor Dina Katabi and student (graduate) Fadel Adib. This is a demonstration of the technology that makes use of Wi-Fi to let the users ‘see’ a person moving behind a wall.

The name is a combination of Wi-Fi and vision; get that? Wi and Vi combined! It has been proven that delicate reflections of wireless inter signals that bounce off a human can be used to track the person’s movements. However, these methods were tiresome and required either a Wi-Fi router in the same room as the person or as Professor Katabi puts it; ‘a whole truck just to carry the radio’.

This new gadget makes use of the antenna that is found in a cell phone or laptop and hence it could be, one day, added to a phone. The key idea is to cancel out certain reflections and retain those that are bouncing off the human. These signals do bounce off other stuff too; walls, floors and furniture and are 10,000-100,000 times stronger as to those which bounce off a human. Katabi’s Wi-Vi sends out two signals, each inverse of one another and using ‘interference nulling’ concept, they cancel each other out unless they hit a moving target! Pretty useful, seeing as how the other stuff is stationary as compared to walls, floors and furniture. Professor said; ‘To silence the noise, we change the structure of the Wi-Fi signal so all the undesired reflections cancel‘. The gadget will be portable and can be used for the safety purpose and could work as a baby monitor too. But the ultimate use might just be cops using it to catch the crooks.