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posted by mrpg on Saturday May 06 2017, @06:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the like-Geordi-La-Forge dept.

Scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed a holographic imaging process that depicts the radiation of a Wi-Fi transmitter to generate three-dimensional images of the surrounding environment. Industrial facility operators could use this to track objects as they move through the production hall.

Just like peering through a window, holograms project a seemingly three-dimensional image. While optical holograms require elaborate laser technology, generating holograms with the microwave radiation of a Wi-Fi transmitter requires merely one fixed and one movable antenna, as Dr. Friedenmann Reinhard and Philipp Holl report in the current issue of the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.

"Using this technology, we can generate a three-dimensional image of the space around the Wi-Fi transmitter, as if our eyes could see microwave radiation," says Friedemann Reinhard, director of the Emmy Noether Research Group for Quantum Sensors at the Walter Schottky Institute of the TU Munich. The researchers envision fields of deployment especially in the domain of industry 4.0 -- automated industrial facilities, in which localizing parts and devices is often difficult.


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  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Sunday May 07 2017, @03:07AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Sunday May 07 2017, @03:07AM (#505690) Journal

    I don't understand why you say it isn't holography. If you merely meant that it isn't using visible light, my response would be that holography encompasses other electromagnetic frequencies too. It's been applied to acoustics as well:

    http://www.popsci.com/scientists-create-tractor-beam-using-sound-holograms [popsci.com]

    I don't see that as a misuse of the term; if you do that's fine.

    Perhaps you meant something else. Here's Wikipedia's explanation of how holography works:

    To record a hologram of a complex object, a laser beam is first split into two separate beams of light. One beam illuminates the object, which then scatters light onto the recording medium. According to diffraction theory, each point in the object acts as a point source of light so the recording medium can be considered to be illuminated by a set of point sources located at varying distances from the medium.

    The second (reference) beam illuminates the recording medium directly. Each point source wave interferes with the reference beam, giving rise to its own sinusoidal zone plate in the recording medium.

    -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holography#Complex_objects [wikipedia.org]

    I didn't read the Physical Review Letters paper about this TUM research, only some news reports that are short on detail. However, it's reported that they are using a "movable" receiving antenna to measure microwaves from a Wi-fi access point. This resembles the description of holography that I quoted above. The receiving antenna takes the place of the recording medium. The microwaves, which are coherent light (albeit not at a visible wavelength), take the place of the laser light. Similarly to traditional holography, the light can reach the antenna directly, or can first interact with the scene being imaged. Having travelled by two different paths, the light interferes with itself and its strength at the receiving antenna is recorded. Measurements of signal strength are taken in different places as the antenna is moved; the measurements are somewhat akin to the grains of silver on a photographic plate. Instead of turning the measurements into a physical object and shining microwaves (or light of a different wavelength) on it to reconstruct the scene, they were processed on a computer to make a visible image of the scene.

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