Many of us have sometimes wondered if our smartphones are eavesdropping on us, but soon our device might be capable of enabling us to spy on others through surfaces, thanks to researchers in Dallas and Seoul.
Funded by Texas Instruments and Samsung, engineers at the University of Texas and Seoul National University have designed a ‘Superman-imager’ chip that will allow portable devices to “see through walls”. But before you get excited about uncovering your neighbours’ darkest secrets, at present the technology is limited to detecting objects around 2 cm away.
Uses
What use is that? For those in the construction industry or Do-It-Yourself fans, the imager could be a solution to age-old problems that currently require magnets, guesswork or long processes of elimination, allowing them to detect studs, wooden beams, or cracked pipework. For medical professionals, the invention could revolutionise how looking inside the human body takes place.
The scientists were not oblivious to privacy and security concerns, hence the limited 2 cm model of operation at the moment, which would oblige a pickpocket, for example, to linger very close to someone to be able to “see through” their bag or purse.
But that operational distance could evolve to over 10 cm and further, and the researchers say the tech has “promise for a wide variety of security, industrial, medical imaging and other everyday life applications.” These include (eventually) seeing better in low visibility conditions, such as fog, dust and rain, as well as being able to inspect items through packaging materials.
How does it work?
Like the technology in airport passenger screening equipment, the imager emits 300-Ghz signals between the microwave and infrared frequency bands that are considered safe for humans. High frequency receiver pixels create images by detecting the signals reflected from the target object.
The findings are the result of two decades of research, with much of the more recent work since 2022 focused on reducing the invention’s size to make it compatible with our handheld phones. No mean feat when you consider the bulk and weight of the most cutting edge airport screening machines, that have required such radical floor reinforcements to be carried out in UK airports that the roll out of those machines has been delayed.
“We designed the chip without lenses or optics so that it could fit into a mobile device,” said Dr said Dr. Wooyeol Choi, assistant professor at Seoul National University and co author of the latest paper. He described the “complementary metal oxide semiconductor concurrent transceiver pixels” as having “the shape of a 0.5-mm square, about the size of a grain of sand.”
