New wireless technology developed by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab promises to kill the Wi-Fi password at last.

Dubbed Chronos, the new system enables a single Wi-Fi access point to locate users to within tens of centimeters without relying on any external sensors. What that means is that it could figure out where people are in a home or office and adjust heating and cooling accordingly. It could also enable a small cafe to better restrict its free Wi-Fi to paying customers.

Existing Wi-Fi devices don’t have wide enough bandwidth to measure the “time of flight” of a signal from transmitter to receiver, or router to device, so typically a person’s position can be determined only by triangulating multiple angles relative to the person from multiple access points.

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