Repurpose Wi-Fi Signals To Gesture Control Everything In Your House

We’ve written about many gesture controlled goodies before, but this one must be the daddy of them all. How would you like to be able to control everything in your house (even without being in the same room) with a swipe of your hand? Now that is gesture control! Think of it as if your entire house is an Xbox Kinect. You don’t need special hardware to make this work either. All you would need is an adapted Wi-Fi router and a few wireless devices.

This system basically use wireless for the purpose of gesture control. According to phys.org, “University of Washington researchers built a ‘smart’ receiver device that essentially listens to all of the wireless transmissions coming from the devices throughout a home, including smartphones, laptops and tablets. A standard Wi-Fi router could be adapted to function as a receiver.”

The system that makes this possible is called WiSee, and it’s a whole-home gesture recognition system using wireless. Just imagine that you’re all snugly in bed, but then realize you left the kitchen light on. Right from your bed you could wave your hand and turn the kitchen light off. Imagine you’re in the bathtub, and you decide you want to change the volume of the music. You could swipe your hand to change the volume.

It’s so sci-fi that it’s almost strange to write about it, but it’s true. It’s being developed right now. WiSee was created by the computer scientists at the University of Washington. They’ve shown that it’s possible to leverage Wi-Fi signals to detect specific movements without needing sensors on the human body or cameras.

This gesture control or gesture recognition technology takes wireless signals and repurposes them for another use. Wouldn’t this be awesome? I’m all over this gesture control stuff. Now all I have to do is figure out how to get the Wi-Fi to fix me a glass of iced tea too. I know, not happening.