MIT can now see through concrete walls | Hacker News Reader

MIT can now see through concrete walls

extremetech.com

96 pointslmathews37 comments

FYI: MIT Lincoln Lab is not quite the same as MIT. Think JPL and Caltech.

Edit: I should have added that MIT LL has a long history of work in microwaves, going back to the invention of radar in WW2.

The above is correct. The lab is an FFRDC managed by MIT. It's a really great place to work! I'm in the computer security group and we're hiring for full time and summer internships. There's a description of my typical day in my profile. I'd love to chat with anyone that is interested at tsally@mit.edu.

Commercial through-wall radar back in 2005, but using UWB instead of S-band: http://www.cambridgeconsultants.com/news_pr150.html

It's not clear what the advantage of using S-band is. Higher resolution, perhaps?

Narrow band electronics are a whole lot easier, and with a lot longer history. Source power is also easier.

Where I live we simply use windows rather than radar for looking through walls.

I understand that there are law enforcement and military applications for this kind of tech, but I really wonder if we need to add the ability to see through walls to the long list of privacy invading technology that is already available.

There are very few good applications for this technology and lots of bad ones.

Stopping scientific discovery because you (or anyone) believes the result will be abused is a bad idea IMHO. Also while you're imagining snooping police, I'm imagining rescue workers locating survivors of a building collapse.

The tech will probably have some peaceful uses, but I don't think they will outweigh the uses for military, law enforcement, espionage etc.

More generally, I think it's a mistake to believe that tech advances are always good overall. An extreme hypothetical example: advances in torture technology. A real-life example: television.

Pragmatically though, you'll never be able to stop new advancements from seeing the light of day. Blocking MIT from researching this won't stop the NSA or defense contractors, and even with a fair government, it wouldn't stop criminals. So far, the best path for dealing with potentially dangerous tech has been to keep it open and studied.

I'm skeptical. If it were very simple in terms of materials to create, say, biological weapons of mass destruction, I'd be in favor of keeping the knowledge under wraps.

Where is that friend button when you need it? ;)

You do have a good point there, but "For the most part, though, at least according to Charvat, the radar array is all about more efficient killing: “This is meant for the urban war fighter … those situations where it’s very stressful and it’d be great to know what’s behind that wall.”", direct from the horse's mouth.

Research like this has implications far beyond the primary application. There's a significant amount of knowledge and technology developed in order to implement the primary application, and most of the value is likely there, in improved processes, small bits of applied tech, and the growth of the students themselves.

These applications generate news, but they're really just the tip of the iceberg.

"the researchers are now working on the output imagery: instead of blobs, they want each moving target to be represented by a cross" -- That can't really be that hard to implement. I'm sure they have bigger issues than this to deal with.

Yeah, that's what I thought, but the press release suggests that it's harder than it sounds: http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/ll-seeing-through-walls-1...

“To understand the blobs requires a lot of extra training."

I suspect the real problem is just that those images are so noisy - in the demo with two people moving around, for instance, it's almost impossible to tell at times whether there's one, two, or more blobs. Certainly it wouldn't be very reliable from a single frame, you'd have to use the movement information.

Personally, I wouldn't waste my time on that, that's a rather straightforward image processing problem that could be made much easier by improving the output quality of the machine, which I imagine would be necessary anyways for this to see any real use in the field.

I believe that is clueless journalist speak for "they want to make an object classifier and tracker next, rather than just displaying raw data"

Easy for your brain, hard for the machine.

Yeah, but it's not a new problem. See the Kinect, for example.

The military application is obvious: wallhack!

Support for it in FPS games will be instant.

FPS games have had wallhack support since Counterstrike was released.

It seems that the real breakthough here is the cost of production? Seeing through walls is certainly nothing new and I thought that the latest and most promising technology for doing this was using Terahertz radiation: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/terahertz-detectio... http://www.hightech-edge.com/terahertz-remote-sensors-detect...

Self-criticizing voice says "And you can get Django to work."

That's exciting, however they seem to still have a lot of work to do and one big challenge : miniaturization.

I don't know the details, but it looks like an array of S-band horns. Those won't get smaller without changing the frequency.

http://www.q-par.com/products/horn-antennas/2-18-GHz-wide-ba...

btw: I would also guess S-band was chosen for a reason. Three are all sorts of atomic vibrational resonances as you scale up in frequency, which might make it harder to get the desired view.

I wonder what could be seen through a normal wall of wood and gyproc or brick.

In most parts of the world, especially war-torn developing regions, a concrete wall is a "normal wall".

An invention solely for military purposes? Sorry but I have to say no.

A lot of inventions were initially for military purposes. I for example can see this used by firefighters and in disaster area after earthquake.

Why cannot it be invented in this positive context in the first place then. I can imagine the reason is money and in that sense it just shows how screwed up our world is.

Developing new tech is expensive. The military has a lot of money. Firefighting departments don't traditionally have trillions of dollars to spend on R&D.

Disapproving of the world doesn't get you the ability to see through walls or build the Internet. Taking military funding does.

our brain development was triggered when the ape discovered how much effective stone and stick in fight and hunt, and it [weapon development] has been the primary driver of the human brain since then.

>Why cannot it be invented in this positive context in the first place then. I can imagine the reason is money and in that sense it just shows how screwed up our world is.

Animals - libido.

Humans - libido plus ability to kill at will (mortido is partial, very incomplete, identification of that fundamental driver) .

Super-humans - libido plus ability to kill at will (highly developed and extremely self-controlled, necessary to avoid the fate of Neanderthals who lost to the much more violent and better at weapons development species - Cro-Magnon) plus the ability you're talking about - the ability to invent, more generally - create in the positive context, ie. "creatido". Creation for the sake of creation, exploration, ...

A few humans through the history have manifested the basic elementary "creatido" thus providing us with the glimpse into the future human species which would evolve from [and will overtake because peaceful co-existence with bloody Cro-Magnon is just impossible ] ours species.

the medium upon which you presented this view was invented for military purposes. It's just a tool, which can be used for good or evil.

welcome in our world, foreigner from a distant galaxy. GPS, and the internet are both military funded inventions we couldnt live without

You mean "couldn't kill without" I think.

maybe i should re-phrase:

wouldnt drive without it. it is astonishing how many americans are so dependent on their navigation system

I get the cynicism, but military != bad. The NEED for military is the bad thing. Don't mix them up.

At its best, the military serves to protect citizens from foreign threats. Like with police, some people are bad and sometimes we have to kill them to defend the good people.

In the hands of the ideal military, technology can serve to lessen civilian casualties, save troops' lives, avoid using troops at all, or act as a deterrent. And yes, we're all aware that no military is ideal.

Ensure your military -- and police -- stick as closely as possible to their strict and just duty... any power can and will be abused. But it strikes me as naive to react against military as an abstract concept. The ostensible goal of protecting a free nation hardly seems ignoble.

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