Steve Perlman's pCell Wireless Technology Could Usher a Revolution in Navigation and Augmented Reality

In 2011 I uncovered the significance of Steve Perlman's DIDO wireless technology that he let slip in a presentation of OnLive at the Columbia Engineering School. Perlman has now, again at the Columbia University in New York, unveiled the fruits of his work on DIDO. The wireless technology is now officially called pCell and is compatible with LTE. Perlman has created a company named Artemis around this technology.

All the major news outlets have covered pCell so I won't rehash it. At the end of his Columbia presentation of pCell that you can see at the end of the article, Perlman again risked the disclosure of other projects that he's working on. He hinted that there are radical announcements to come from Artemis and that you can see one of them in the intro video that he showed at the presentation. You can view the pCell intro video below.



You don't even have to watch the video carefully to notice that this radical announcement is navigation and subsequently augmented reality. You can witness overlays that display information around buildings, cars and even people. A fully connected world.

Since the pCell technology can make out and position pCell radios to a precision of 1 cm, even in fast moving vehicles, this is the ultimate navigation tech. Imagine pCell radios being built into cars, drones, on building walls and inside buildings, on streets and under streets, and of course into people's mobiles or other wearables like Google Glass.

Enabling autonomous cars and drones suddenly sounds easy. You can follow every object that has pCell radios on it to a precision of 1 cm from kilometers away. You can cover buildings or moving objects with pCell radios, and see a 3D map of not only streets but even moving objects inside the world. The ultimate motion capture machine.

With pCell augmented reality can get reality, but it goes further. Not only can people see information overlaid over other people and the world around them. Suddenly autonomous machines can see the world and its motion in precision, the autonomous internet of things becomes reality. From there Skynet isn't far.