We
have already seen the motion tracking devices like Xbox Kinect, the gaming
platform from Microsoft which tracks your motion with its camera. So, if you’re
away from the camera, it loses you.
There is another way to do it, tracking by electrical signals. We are
always surrounded by electrical signals which leak from every device like
computer, light, T.V, etc. We can use this electrical sea for our motion
tracking by tracking the ripples we make in this sea. Researchers at Microsoft,
US have figured a way to use someone’s body as an antenna and sense his
position and motion through an experiment.
In the first experiment,
the researchers planned to track their motion. So, the volunteers were asked to
move in two selective places, the kitchen and the living room which differ
mainly in the space and no., of electrical appliances which in turn affect the
electrical waves. They have asked to carry on certain movements like bending
over, waving, stepping to the right or left and occasional punches or kicks.
With Artificial Intelligence (AI), they trained the computer to recognize the
electrical signatures of each movement. Later on, the computer can recognize by
its own. But, the electrical appliances in a home will not behave in a constant
way. For example, the refrigerator works using thermostat and the level of work
varies with temperature and the disturbance it creates in electrical waves too
varies. The computer needs to know this difference in noises and effectively
track the position.
Firstly
we need a device which can track these ripples. The researchers have used a
wireless data sensor that’s twice the size of a mobile. They tied these at the
back of volunteer’s body and the signals they pick up were transmitted to a
computer which then calculates their movement.
In
the second experiment, they wanted to track their movement between the rooms.
They picked two large rooms and six other scattered places and made the
computer to learn each location’s electrical signature and the volunteer’s
positions in these locations by it own. This was pretty tough, but, the
computer did really well, almost 100% of the time. The computer had started
tracking location using just the first experiment’s data and became an expert
with this new 2nd experiment’s data.
These
experiments show us the accuracy and efficiency of this system. And this
system’s accuracy in tracking the location and movement also provides a feature
to use same movement for different applications at different places. For example,
we can turn on a TV in living room with a punching motion and the same punching
motion can be used to turn on the microwave in kitchen. And, we just hope that
these motion tracking devices would become small enough in the near future to
be used as a normally.
-By Neel kumar
CSE (4/4)
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