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Wenqi Zhang, Sven Mayer, Jesse T. Gonzalez, Chris Harrison
Vibrosight++: City-Scale Sensing Using Existing Retroreflective Signs and Markers
Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, (CHI '21), Association for Computing Machinery, 2021-05-08 (bib)

Today's smart cities use thousands of physical sensors distributed across the urban landscape to support decision making in areas such as infrastructure monitoring, public health, and resource management. These weather-hardened devices require power and connectivity, and often cost thousands just to install, let alone maintain. In this paper, we show how long-range laser vibrometry can be used for low-cost, city-scale sensing. Although typically limited to just a few meters of sensing range, the use of retroreflective markers can boost this to 1km or more. Fortuitously, cities already make extensive use of retroreflective materials for street signs, construction barriers, road studs, license plates, and many other markings. We describe how our prototype system can co-opt these existing markers at very long ranges and use them as unpowered accelerometers for use in a wide variety of sensing applications.