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What Wi-Fi Would Look Like If We Could See It
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Artist Nickolay Lamm, a blogger for MyDeals.com, decided to shed some light on the subject. He created visualizations that imagine the size, shape, and color of wi-fi signals were they visible to the human eye. 'I feel that by showing what wi-fi would look like if we could see it, we'd appreciate the technology that we use everyday,' Lamm told me in an email. 'A lot of us use technology without appreciating the complexity behind making it work.'"
I could always see it that way. I thought it looked that way to everyone? I always wondered why when I took a photo I wouldn't see the waves in the photo.
I wish they were visible...
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Wifi is just microwave radiation. We already 'see' microwave radiation, it is called 'radar'.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
This quote is a little off: "The distance between wifi waves is shorter than that of radio waves...". It is radio, at 2.4 GHz. (first post?)
Some days it's just not worth chewing through the restraints.
Surely it would just look like light (with a different 'colour'). Things that block it would not appear to give off light, things that allow it to pass would appear to glow, and things that reflect it would just be visible if there is already some ambient wifi 'light' to reflect.
Is this actually how things work at these lower frequencies? Or would it work completely differently in regards to how it refracts/reflects etc?
So what's the use of the 'a blogger for MyDeals.com'-line? I thought I actually ticked the 'i don't want to see ads'-option on Slashdot...
"Artist Nickolay Lamm, a blogger for MyDeals.com and Barbie photoshopping enthusiast"
also wonder what the waves in the visible spectrum look like.
Have gnu, will travel.
There should be an app for this. You walk around in an area to gather data, and then you can look at where the WiFi signals are. Maybe share this with other phones nearby, so you can crowdsource a view of the WiFi landscape.
This is what it would look like for all radio frequency(RF) devices.
Television is a Radio Frequency device. Mind asplode.
Yawnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
>The crests of waves is translated to a 1 by a computer, and the the troughs equal a 0.
So, every Wifi signal is "10101010101010101010101010101010..."?
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
that we can't see them. ;)
Bah.. Decided entire TFA was trash once I read that line.
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Looks like what Geordi sees.
This reminds me:
I once heard an explanation - geared towards children - of what electricity is. It went somewhat like this - "Don't ever ever ever do this, but, if you were to cut open an electric wire and look inside it, you would see a blue spark. That is electricity"
Wouldn't the signal leave the antenna structure as a waves of spheres? Not lines? The spheres would be strongest at the top of the "sine wave" and absent at the bottom of the wave. Sort of like sound is spheres of compression of denser and less dense.
Think of the crest of each sine wave as an expanding sphere, followed by more and more spheres all expanding from the antenna.
As a particular wave crest (eg sphere) expands from the center point, which is the transmitting antenna, the energy at any point on the surface of the sphere is decreased as the square of the number of furlongs it has traveled from the antenna.
Being an electromagnetic wave the magnetic wave and electrical charge wave are out of phase with each other. Wouldn't spheres of magnetism be strongest at the point where the spheres of electrical charge disappear -- and vice versa -- spheres of electrical charge are strongest at the places where magnetism goes to zero?
Or am I imagining or understanding this wrong? (I mean, I have little more than basic general science level understanding of electromagnetic waves.)
If we 'see' it, like we see light, then would we see the waves (spheres) at all? Wouldn't we just see bright spots where antennas seem like sources of illumination? And some materials are opaque and cast 'shadows' and other materials are transparent to WiFi? (eg, a black plastic garbage bag might be 'transparent')
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
It would look like an ocean of blood, sweat and tears permeating our cities.
This is just copying what Richard Hammond did a few years ago.
There are fourteen WiFi channels, each corresponding to electromagnetic radiation ranging from 2412 MHz (12.43 cm) to 2484 MHz (12.07 cm.) The visible light we see with is also electromagnetic radiation, but ranges from 700 to 390 nm wavelength. I'm not sure what materials reflect, absorb and transmit 12.43 to 12.07 cm wavelength light, but once that's accounted for wouldn't "seeing" WiFi essentially be the same as seeing a rapidly flashing, single colored (assuming it was operating on a single channel,) omnidirectional light bulb? The rainbow emanations in TFA strike me as pretty artistic interpretations, which is apparently the point in order to drum up "appreciation" for WiFi, but my IANAP (I Am Not A Physicist) understanding suggests there's little to do with reality here.
Already done, much better elsewhere,... ...though since it was not in the US, the slashdot community will ignore it.
http://www.nearfield.org/2011/02/wifi-light-painting
a Coward.
No reflections, no lobes from the gain antennas, no blockage from green trees. It's 100% art with 5% reality.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
No, WiFi does not go in one direction. It would be more of a haze, denser in one area and less dense in another. It would be moving out from antennae, with the strength noticeably weaker behind some obstructions. You could visually see the inverse-squared law if WiFi weree visible.
The OP is full of $#!T.
what would a cat5 cable look like if I could see it?
but he is wrong about how "wifi" would look. IOWs, he (the artist) and the OP is full of shit.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
What Wi-Fi Would Look Like If We Could See It, Only... Not
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Buy a copy of AirMagnet Surveyor or another viz tool, an AP, a supported wifi NIC, and get a hold of some blueprints for the space in question.
In a large WiFi deployment step 1 is to do a wireless site survey and generate a heat map. A physical map of the building showing all the WiFi signals.
In many large deployments there is also technology in use to map the Wifi signal real time, for instance Cisco's Wireless LAN Controllers: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/wireless/wcs/4.0/configuration/guide/wcsmaps.html
Now, this guy is doing something slightly novel in that he's mapping multiple WiFi sources in a public space. But I doubt many NOC guys would find this all that interesting, since they stare at screens of it all day long.
More like a donut than a sphere, commonly, but it all comes down to the type of antennae alignment of antennae, and the frequency and amplitude of the waves.
Some odd time ago I was in a training class for a job supporting smart phones and similar devices (oh god I have fallen so far from grace!). The instructor scribbled a quick visualization of signals from a cell tower and wifi. She drew crude waves emanating from a tower and wifi device (she drew them in blue)--of course we all got it, right? There was one student in the class who stopped everything to mention that he lived very close to a tower and never saw these blue waves emanating from it or his wifi router, and wanted to know why. With the exception of those chuckling, the class was otherwise stunned into silence. The individual was asked to not return the next day.
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The idea is nice, but the actual images are completely wrong. WiFi is just electromagnetic waves and those in turn are nothing other then light at another wavelength, i.e. a different color if you will, see this infrared image. This means being able to see WiFi signals would look fundamentally no different then just seeing ordinary light. You wouldn't see waves shooting out of your router, as you can't see waves unless they actually hit your detector, so the thing would simply glow like a light source. The thing where it gets interesting is in how different materials react to the WiFi, materials that are obaque to regular light would be transparent for WiFi signals, while others that are transparent for light would be opaque to WiFi. How much or how little WiFi gets reflected would also change. Being able to see how directional the signal of different antenna could also be interesting. There might also be issues with image resolution, as the wavelength determines how good you can resolve an image (not sure if that's just a practical limit of detector size or actually a physical limit).
Anyway, some simple photoshopping won't cut it, it would probably need a raytracer to simulate the wave propagation properly.
How unicorn farts would smell if the wind blew one your way on a warm day in July...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
No reflections, no lobes from the gain antennas, no blockage from green trees.
... lame
I was about to post along these lines too...... Will add here that they're not perfect sine waves either as this is what's depicted - you require modulation to send information.
No interactions with cars, power lines, interactions between other towers, geological features, buildings, peope, ....
WIFI siglans would never look so pretty.There would be great disturbances in the force.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
with 5% reality.
The artist is probably not reading Slashdot, so you didn't have to be so generous with the sugar coating.
Watch Alphas, and you can too!
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We already 'see' microwave radiation, it is called 'radar'.
No we do not see it - our eyes are not sensitive to that region of the EM spectrum. We can detect it but that requires a device which detects the waves and then displays the information to us in a human accessible form like radar, radio or TV. If we could see WiFi then it would look nothing like the artist's rendition. For a start we would not see the crests and troughs of the wave anymore than we see the crests and troughs of light waves or hear the crests and troughs of sound waves. Then there is the problem that the artist seems to have drawn the waves and lines or planes from which light is emitted. Again this is wrong. Unless something is scattering the EM waves you will not see them unless they are aimed at you. This is a classic mistake made by artists. Think of a laser pointer - unless there is dust in the air to scatter some of the beam in your direction you only see the spot on the projection screen not a beam between the pointer and the screen.
What you would actually see if you could see WiFi would be a glow of a fixed 'colour' emanating from the router and visible through walls and other radio-transparent objects. Metal objects would reflect this light so really what you would see is one bright spot that might appear in the middle of a wall or a floor etc plus several other less-bright spots due to reflections off metal.
Now you might argue that this is overly nitpicking on an artistic work but if an artist comes up with a clever idea like this is it really too much for them to actually put a little thought into it and read up some simple physics to figure out what it might actually look like? Afterall if they decided to draw an elephant without ever having seen one wouldn't they take the time to read up about them and either find a picture of one or visit one in a zoo. It would be insane to try to draw one without this and I doubt anyone would recognize it as an elephant if they tried. Well guess what - the same applies if you are trying to draw something physics related!
The a loose artistic license visualizing a wave, or the insane amount of bullshit in this thread. ....
I'm seeing stuff from "a spectrum analyzer is the size view of a three dimensional wave" to "crests of waves are 1"
article mentions National Mall in Washington city, not state. all this time i thought the national mall in the US was a big shopping center with department stores. i need to get out more
but seriously, the radio waves in the photos/renders look like artwork to me.
OK, sorry, before I took computer science (BSc) I went to college and got an ASc in Electronics Engineering. Studied electromagnetic radiation. Yep, radar, cell phone signals, radio, tv, microwave, radar, police radio, fire/ambulance, air traffic, millitary, space communications, satellite tv, baby monitors, cordless phones, microwave relay, CB and Ham radio, wireless keyboards, aircraft and police radar, and every other damn thing under the sun (including wifi) are all surrounding you, right now. Some are more line of sight (higher frequencies), and some more easily scatter around objects and refract on the ionisphere and travel around the earth (lower frequencies). Yep. The different frequencies can be called channels, be they wi-fi, tv, ship to shore, cell phone or fire/ambulance. Sometimes I'm shocked about how little other people know about technology. I won't talk about superposition theory, nortons theory, thevenins theory, superheterodyne receivers, tank circuits, mixers, phase locked loops or any of that other stuff. Today we are grasping em radiation. Did you know that at even higher frequencies (even Higher than wifi) we call it ....wait for it.... light? Damn! Only there, instead of talking about lower and higher frequencies, we say "it looks red" or "it looks blue".
yeah ... I've done a little bit of designing WiFi networks to work in very difficult locations, and the general thought experiment is to think of both ends of the path as the points of a football. Unless there's ground in the way, in which case the football goes through the earth, except when it doesn't. Or if there's a metal roof inside the football, except all of that is illusory and not really what it looks like, to the extent that anything exists and is not virtual. It's not like visible light in its behavior, and these get wildly different at different frequencies.
I get the impression that Tesla could visualize it, but most humans just don't have it in them.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This is imagery in the article is really very misleading. What would be more meaningful to set the visible spectrum to black ( so no colour for the buildings) and then set some colours for each individual wifi transmitter. In fact it would look more like an image of Earth from space with only the lights showing, but rather than light it would be a microwave image. It would probably show only the faintest outline of buildings as the RF is absorbed creating an odd looking set of structures. But to 'see' the RF you would also need to set up a kind of 'RF reflective' fog particles in the scene to view the reflections ( a bit like the way you need dust to see a laser beam in the dark)
These pictures are half-assed photoshops, they do not come for real measurement, they do not vizualise anything. They give an "artistic rendition", and a fake one that is. In the real world, radio waves do not cross a wall or a window the same way, they bounce back, they resonate... If you want to see a cruder yet more information-bearing representation of a wifi signal's attenuation, check this instead: http://hackaday.com/2011/03/02/how-to-find-wifi-carry-a-big-stick-and-use-long-exposures/
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Not to mention that proper footballs are round.
(Sorry)
No wonder the bees have fucked off.
Actually, I kinda like it. Definitely the gayest WiFi visualization I've ever seen. If WiFi really covered the landscape in rainbows, you can't tell me it wouldn't be a better world.
RF... the next type of pollution to demonstrate against! 8-)
Also, wouldn't all the waves be spherical from the source point? It seems like he is lacking the 3 dimensional aspect of waves.