WiSee

What is WiSee?

WiSee is a novel interaction interface that leverages ongoing wireless transmissions in the environment (e.g., WiFi) to enable whole-home sensing and recognition of human gestures. Since wireless signals do not require line-of-sight and can traverse through walls, WiSee can enable whole-home gesture recognition using few wireless sources (e.g., a Wi-Fi router and a few mobile devices in the living room).

WiSee is the first wireless system that can identify gestures in line-of-sight, non-line-of-sight, and through-the-wall scenarios. Unlike other gesture recognition systems like Kinect, Leap Motion or MYO, WiSee requires neither an infrastructure of cameras nor user instrumentation of devices. We implement a proof-of-concept prototype of WiSee and evaluate it in both an office environment and a two-bedroom apartment. Our results show that WiSee can identify and classify a set of nine gestures with an average accuracy of 94%.

People

Students

Qifan Pu
Sidhant Gupta

Faculty

Shyam Gollakota
Shwetak Patel

Contact: wisee-contact@cs.washington.edu

Publications

Whole-Home Gesture Recognition Using Wireless Signals [paper]

Qifan Pu, Sidhant Gupta, Shyam Gollakota, Shwetak Patel
The 19th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom'13) (Best Paper Award)

Whole-Home Gesture Recognition Using Wireless Signals (Demo) [paper]

Qifan Pu, Siyu Jiang, Shyam Gollakota
ACM SIGCOMM'13

Links

AllSee

Frequently Asked Questions

Does WiSee require modification of wireless standards (like WiFi)?

No, WiSee requries no change to current standards.

So WiSee is a stand-alone device?

Not necessarily. It could be potentially implemented in today's wireless devices in the near future. Imagine that you might be able to buy wireless router which could also do gesture recognition. WiSee enabled!

How does WiSee deal with motion interference from other people in the environment?

WiSee takes advantage of the technology trend of MIMO, the fact that wireless devices today carry multiple antennas (which are primarily used to improve capacity). A WiSee/WiSee-enabled receiver would use these multiple antennas in a different way to focus only on the user in control, thus eliminating interference from other people.

Would I accidentally trigger commands through WiSee?

Unlikely. You always perform a startup sequence of gestures to get into the control system before sending the real gesture commands. The startup sequence could be relatively long so false positives become rare cases. Such a startup sequence can also serve as your personal password, in this way the system is protected against adversaries.