Your wireless router may be giving you away in manner you never dreamed of. For the first time, physicists have used radio waves from a Wi-Fi transmitter to encode a 3D image of a real object in a hologram similar to the image of Princess Leia projected by R2D2 in the movie Star Wars. In principle, the technique could enable outsiders “see” the inside of a room using only the Wi-Fi signals leaking out of it, although some researchers say such spying may be easier said than done.

The idea came about a few years ago, says Friedemann Reinhard, an expert on quantum sensors at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany. “At lunch we had a discussion about what the world would look through Wi-Fi eyes,” he says, “and it became clear that if you want to see the world through Wi-Fi, you could make a hologram.”

To read more, click here.