Human Antennas? Artificial Intelligence in Rabbit Ears? Where is my coffee? Holey Moley
Likely before your time, but in the old days of TV, some TVs had “rabbit ears” and if you held them the channel you wanted to watch would come in better.
So what if Microsoft goes one better than Kinect, where you are the controller to Antinect (I just made up that name) where you are the antenna?
Not a bad idea, not original, any conductive surface makes a dandy antenna, but it is either useless, useful or damaging antenna, usually the one you don’t want.
Electrical Engineers have spent years make sure that humans DO NOT affect the electrical circuits. But no one thought to use artificial intelligence to see if this “human electric field” could be useful!
Of course, Microsoft did not make human’s antenna’s, it is just natural, especially since the human body could be considered a big bag of salty solution with some calcium thrown in.
I like the quote from the article:
“The next step will be building a working interactive system. Currently the team is researching the engineering challenges that arise when a user moves around in a less controlled environment than the ones in their experiments.”
I guess each generation has to determined that it isn’t the most unique in development of ideas. Since Tesla, using human generated electric fields to control circuits has been a dream. The most controllable has been the use of capacitance, billions in use on phones, etc. There have been musical instruments that used changes in inductance to change musical notes (used in older sci-fi films for example). But no one gave any thought to widely used controls, this is unique thinking!
This is the first time that I have seen that there might be a way to use the wiring in a home or business directly. One problem that I can think of is: What about ferro-concrete buildings? What about the way AC power feeds interact with each other? Have the team spoke with the folks at Smart Home about some of the issues around working with AC signaling devices.
Certainly using AC for signaling has been around for a long time, the older phone systems used to use AC impressed on DC to transmit and receive phone calls.
This is just way cool.