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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?
The bloggers at MyDeals.com are some of the most forward thinking RF engineers on the planet, though, be sure not to confuse them with the exceptional Geo engineers often found blogging for FreeCreditReportOnline.com... those guys are genius.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
>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
And don't ever ever do this, but this is what electricity tastes like...
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.
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.
What Wi-Fi Would Look Like If We Could See It, Only... Not
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
A series of tubes.
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.
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!
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)