SIGCOMM13: See Through Walls with Wi-Fi!

Fadel Adib and Dina Katabi

Goal: Enabling us to see moving objects through walls and behind closed doors.

Method: Detect the signals reflect from moving objects behind the walls.

Challenge: Wall reflection is 10000x stronger than reflection coming behind the wall.

Proposed method: Wi-Vi

1.      Eliminate the wall reflection

We can eliminate all static reflection by performing interference nulling, while the signals from moving objects would not be removed and thus can be tracked.

2.      Track people from reflection

Because human move emulates antenna array, we can track direction of motion.

3.      Gesture based interface

Wi-Vi thus can enable a human who does not carry any wireless device to communicate commands or short messages to a receiver using simple gestures. For example, simple gestures like moving forward and backward can represent bit “0” and “1”.