A new 'smart skin' for rooms can bend radar waves to see heartbeats and movements hidden in shadows or around corners.
March 31, 2026
Original Paper
Radar Cross Section Characterization of Quantized Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces
arXiv · 2603.27961
The Takeaway
Traditional radar can only see what is directly in its line of sight, much like a flashlight. Researchers developed a programmable surface that can 're-program' electromagnetic waves to bounce into hidden areas, allowing it to recover data from 'invisible' regions and even detect tiny vibrations like a human pulse where conventional radar would see nothing.
From the abstract
We present a radar sensing framework based on a low-complexity, quantized reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) that enables programmable manipulation of electromagnetic wavefronts for enhanced detection in non-specular and shadowed regions. We develop closed-form expressions for the scattered field and radar cross section (RCS) of phase-quantized RIS apertures based on aperture field theory, accurately capturing the effects of quantized phase, periodicity, and grating lobes on radar detectio