Connecting RF-Powered Devices to the Internet : http://iotwifi.cs.washington.edu/
3-D printed objects connect to WiFi without electronics : http://www.washington.edu/news/2017/12/05/in-first-3-d-print...
Also there was https://github.com/seemoo-lab/mobisys2018_nexmon_software_de....
If you think about it, there are a lot more things that can be done with wifi if you can arbitrarily TX/RX signals. In fact I'm getting a bit scared now.
The closest thing I can see them mention in that paper is their adoption of the "zig-zag scanning" rather than raster scanning. But how many pixels that skips over is very variable dependent on the input image.
There's also the "super-pixels" thing, but that's pretty standard for video compression right? Macro-blocks and B/P-frames, corrected with occasional full-resolution I-frames...
They also note the effect of distance, both in the abstract and in the results.. 720@60 at 10 feet, but only 480@10 at 16 feet. Not remarkable results, but they're not lying in their abstract...
Lets try 720@10fps. Budget is 3MB per 8 seconds. 64x36@10 L frames = 184KB, 921KB I frame, leaves us with 236KB/s, enough BW to transfer at max only ~20% of changed super-pixels per second. Even their simulated demo video doesnt appear to be real.
Things just dont add up.