Researchers See Through Walls With 'Wi-Vi'

Want X­ray vision like the man of steel? A technology that lets you see behind walls could soon be built in to your cell phone.

MIT professor Dina Katabi and graduate student Fadel Adib have announced Wi­Vi, a demonstration of a technology that uses Wi­Fi to allow a viewer to "see" a person moving behind a wall. (Wi­Vi stands for "Wi­Fi" and "vision.")

Previous work demonstrated that the subtle reflections of wireless inter signals bouncing off a human could be used to track that person's movements, but those previous experiments either required that awireless router was already in the room of the person being tracked, or "a whole truck just to carry the radio," said Katabi.