The technology is called VIDAR™, which stands for vibration detection and ranging. It is a “new class of wide area sensor system for recording, labelling and visualising objects and events in real-time”, which operates by capturing and analysing vibrations across large geographical grids, using fibre optic cables.
Slattery (pictured) said the technology is “simply the most exciting” to emerge from Australia and he expects it to be “bigger than 5G”.
He said: “When I first saw this, I knew it was special, but as we have seen improvements in AI, DSP capabilities of advanced GPU and cloud, this whole FiberSense capability envelope keeps lifting to another level. I genuinely don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say this is simply the most exciting technology to ever come out of Australia. This will be bigger than 5G, in fact, I’m starting to wonder if this could become as big as cloud.”
VIDAR does not require cameras, voice recordings or facial recognition, which is “turning out to be a very important advantage”, according to the firm.
Dr Mark Englund, FiberSense’s founder and CEO and the person who conceived the idea, said the new technology uses existing telecom fibre assets to detect and capture “minute vibrations given off by nearby objects”, which are transmitted to a centralised digital platform. This platform then uses specialised digital signal processing (DSP) and AI to digitise, categorise, label and, if necessary, action these vibrations.
“Our ability to digitise an entire city grid of all movement and events will be a game-changer for how we sense, move through and interact in public spaces. The fact we can do this anonymously by not using cameras, seeing faces or number plates or hearing voices is something we didn’t appreciate early but it is turning out to be a very important advantage in our deployments to date – privacy over VIDAR grids is hard-wired in from day one,” Englund continued.
The technology has already been used for Superloop’s terrestrial fibre networks in Singapore and Australia, Transgrid HV terrestrial assets in Sydney, shore ends of Basslink’s HV undersea power cable between Tasmania and Victoria and front-haul networks of submarine cable operators Southern Cross Cable Networks.
These deployments have detected, classified and notified more than 26,000 events and now operate with a false negative detection rate of 0.011%.
The sensing systems and data are concentrated into a real-time digital platform called SuperSoniQ, which is accessible as a cloud service. With the foundations of the SuperSoniQ platform and IP completed over the last five years, the company is now focusing on R&D.
Now, FiberSense is in the process of using VIDAR to build “an entire digital city grid”. With an emphasis on vehicle tracking, this grid will be the first in which all vehicles are digitised and captured using VIDAR to be represented in a dynamic virtual world, in real-time.
