Microsoft’s Kinect is currently considered the most successful commercial motion-tracking hardware. Now it appears that Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is on the verge of outdoing Microsoft on this front. Researchers at the university have devised a motion-tracking technology that is able to track people through walls.
For now, MIT folks are calling it the ‘Kinect of the future.’ According to the details revealed by the researchers who are a part of the team, this futuristic technology relies on radio waves to discern the exact location of an individual. Thanks to these radio waves, this location can be gauged even if a person is in another room.
Interestingly, the person whose location is being tracked doesn’t need to carry a transmitter. For now, this technology is able to track down the location and movements of a given person down to an accuracy of +/- 10 centimeters. There are some limitations though. For instance, the technology can track the movements of only a single person for now and is unable to identify between multiple people. It is expected that over time and with improvements, this is indeed the future of motion-tracking technology.
According to an MIT researcher, Fadel Adib, “What we’re doing here is localization through a wall without requiring you to hold any transmitter or receiver [and] simply by using reflections off a human body. What is impressive is that our accuracy is higher than even state of the art Wi-Fi localization.”
Once this advanced motion-tracking technology is improved and perfected, it can be used in endless applications. For instance, such a technology can be instrumental, letting doctors keep track of the condition of many different patients in real-time. It can also be used for security purposes in a wide range of scenarios.
Courtesy: Mashable
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