Video: Wi-Fi gesture recognition tech turns your entire home into a Clapper ad

Anyone who remembers the ’80s surely recalls the television ads for The Clapper, the sound recognition system that you could use to turn lights and appliances off and on just by clapping your hands. Researchers at the University of Washington have come up with a more sophisticated version of this idea by configuring Wi-Fi antennas used in your home gadgets to interpret hand gestures so you can turn on lights, adjust your thermostat and change channels on your television all with the wave of a hand. The University of Washington says that its technology is very similar to the technology used for Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect sensor but adds that it’s “simpler, cheaper and doesn’t require users to be in the same room as the device they want to control… because Wi-Fi signals can travel through walls and aren’t bound by line-of-sight or sound restrictions.” A video demonstration of the technology is posted below.