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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.
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 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.
On a side note, we already have technology that can "see" RF...it's called a Spectrum Analyzer. Many are available in many forms. Or you could simply download one of the many Wi-Fi software tools available and visualize what is happening in those (Wi-Fi) regions of the RF spectrum right from your very own computer or tablet. I suppose if you wanted to get downright stupid you could tape a directional RF antenna on your head and pipe the output from your analyzer into a pair of LCD goggles. Woo-hoo.
In other words, this article is downright shit and has zero credibility other than some asshat that was getting fruity on the ol' rainbow gaussian blur in Photoshop over some stock pictures.
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!
Yup, this is worthless.
in TFA, the person creating the pretty images is cited:
"Wifi waves are about 3 to 5 inches from crest to crest.
The crests of waves is translated to a 1 by a computer,
and the the troughs equal a 0."
I laughed out loud and closed the tab.