4 ms·
It's funny I actually had the idea of doing this exact project yesterday, although I would probably have never gotten around to it. Rather than just being a fu
by robertelder 10y ago
It's funny I actually had the idea of doing this exact project yesterday, although I would probably have never gotten around to it.
Rather than just being a fun little project, I could see there being a few practical uses for this: If you could modify the protocol so that the 'QR code' could dynamicly resize down to be in the worst case 1 pixel for the whole screen, you could potentially do line of sight communication using just laptops between tens of kilometers away[1]. There aren't a lot of situations where you'd need that, but I could see scientists on a remote research mission finding in handy to be able to just pull out their laptops and send messages between mountain tops by just double-clicking some kind of application.
A crappy webcam that could do 10 frames per second that was looking for an entire monitor in the on/off state could send O(10) bits per second which would be useful enough to send small text messages. If you used a telescope, you could actually send real amounts of data.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/539826/how-far-can-the-human-eye-see-a-candle-flame/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/539826/how-far-can-the-hu...
Edit: Upon close inspection of the article I linked, it says later in the article that you could only see the flame 2.76 km away, but I don't think that changes my point very much since a laptop screen would be brighter.
- userbinator 10y agoCombine with some steganography and you can use this method to broadcast data over otherwise normal-looking videos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12166332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12166332
- andreareina 10y agoIn practice you're limited to sending information at half the theoretical maximum resolution[1], so 5 fps. Still has some very interesting possibilities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist_frequency (updated link, s/rate/frequency/)
- andars 10y agoI don't think so. We aren't interested in reconstructing the signal, so if we have 10 samples of the flashing screen we will have 10 bits. If I'm wrong please correct me.