What began as a reconnaissance project for the military, developed into a new, wearable device, scheduled for field testing this summer, which quickly maps the three-dimensional geometry and energy efficiency of buildings.
“Our focus was to recover the floor plans of a building in one walkthrough,” says Avideh Zakhor, professor of electrical engineering at the University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, Calif., whose research began as a Department of Defense project in 2007, with the goal of creating a reconnaissance instrument that can be worn by a soldier and recover the layout and geometry of any building or room as the soldier walks.