Humans have eyes with two-dimensional arrays of light receptors. These recognize a spatial light distribution and anything less than a two-dimensional display would fall short of human viewing habits.
We wanted something that reflects radio waves with a bunch of tricks as light. Just like a mirror. For this then a special display made from LEDs was dreamed up. In various discussion a first idea for this display type was developed by NA et al. It basically is a low-resolution, display that can be programmed at a very low level to make it exactly respond to a preprocessed radio wave signal.
Great! This LED matrix is at the heart of our Mirror of Things that magically converts invisible radio waves into visible light. Can you follow where we want to go with this?
First we experimented with many antennas in order to drive the numerous LEDs we wanted to illuminate. But this became tedious with ten or more antennas. And cost inefficient as well. So future work by NA et al. went into clever concepts of signal processing in order to represent a radio wave, or more precisely an electromagnetic field distribution, by a lot of LEDs...
