WiFi Atlas

What can you do with it?

Walk, see where the Wi-Fi works, and keep a map of it.

• See the signal in AR — walk around and coloured dots appear in the space behind you, from green to purple.
• Get a floor map — save the walk and it flattens into a top-down heatmap, with the weakest spot and the dead zones marked.
• Measure in real metres — the map is to scale, so you know how big the weak area actually is.
• Export it — share the map as PNG or PDF, or the raw readings as CSV.

Why it matters

Walking around a home, the Wi-Fi works in some places and drops in others — and it is hard to tell where, or to remember it later.

• Every Wi-Fi tool gives you a number for where you are standing — not a picture of the whole home.
• Turned into an image, where the Wi-Fi works is visible at a glance, and it stays on the map instead of in your memory.
• It measures what a person actually feels — delay and dropped packets — not only radio strength. A room can show full bars and still be unusable.

How it works

Three steps, from a walk to a map.

1. Measure while you walk — the app keeps pinging the router and turns delay and packet loss into a 0–100% score.
2. Pin each reading in space — ARKit tracks where the phone is, so every reading stays at the spot it was taken.
3. Flatten into a floor map — dropping the height leaves the floor plane. Gaps between readings are filled in, and rooms nobody walked into stay blank instead of being guessed.

How was it tested, and how does it perform?

Wi-Fi changes from second to second, even standing still. So one ping never decides a spot.

• Measure continuously — the app checks the connection about three times a second while you walk.
• Combine per spot — every reading taken on the way to a spot, about every 35 cm, becomes one value: the median reply time, lowered by the share of pings that went unanswered.

Applications

• Where to put a Wi-Fi extender — the map shows where coverage fades, so you can see where an extender should go.
• Choosing where to work — find the spot with the steadiest connection for a desk.
• Checking a new home or office — survey the space before moving in.

Future directions

• Accurate maps with LiDAR — the map now comes from the camera alone, so its shape is not exact. LiDAR was tried and set aside so every phone behaved the same; bringing it back where available would sharpen the map.
• Across floors — going down a floor breaks the map, and two storeys in one walk stack on top of each other from above.
• Walls in AR — the camera does not know where walls are, so dots behind a wall show through it in the AR view.