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What If You Could See WiFi?
- noonespecial 13y agoIllustrations like these do more harm than good. It lets people imagine that spaces are getting 'flooded' with 'stuff'. Radio is a light. A blinking light. A transmitting antenna like a light bulb. If your receiver can see the light blink (or a reflection of it) the signal gets through. Radio has the added benefit that (especially at longer wavelengths) most of the material world appears to be made of tissue paper.
- everyone 13y agoThis is why I like reading HN comments. Most comments on this would be "ohh woah cool amaazing man!!" But here people are not so easily persuaded, thing is not physically accurate!
- kemist 13y agoSometimes a paragraph can paint a better picture than an illustration.
- toyg 13y agoWell, radio pollution is still under debate. In Italy they've supposedly found significant discrepancies in cancer distribution near large radio transmitters (i.e. higher rates of cancer). We're talking humongous power and extreme proximity though, nothing like wifi.
- noonespecial 13y agoBright lights can give you sunburns. Ask a welder. Caution and common sense should be applied whenever in the presence of bright lights that shine right through us. (eg X-rays)
- jlgreco 13y agoUV is a wildly different animal than wifi or cellular signals.
- afreak 13y agoCorrelation is not causation. There has been no conclusive link between EM radiation and human ailments other than hysteria. We creatures have throughout history been bombarded with intense radio activity from outer space (such as the emissions from the crab nebula), and we are still alive and plentiful. Quit it with the fear mongering while ahead.
- toyg 13y agoUpvoted despite the personal attack. Can we keep it civil ? I don't think I was fear mongering, I just said what was reported over there.
- Metrop0218 13y agoYou most definitely were not.
- afreak 13y agoIt wasn't intended to be a personal attack and I do apologise for that, but I do get bothered when I see baseless accusations that non-ionising radiation is going to kill us all. Of course with enough intensity it could cause problems, but there are sources of high-powered EM radiation that bombard us every day that are from natural sources. We won't be dying from this stuff any time soon.
- Ackley 13y agoIf radiations are strong enough that you can feel the heat, it means that your are cooking.
- lambersley 13y agoCausation or correlation?
- somesay 13y agoThat's actually the reason why people who are blocking new transmitters are somehow dumb. Less transmitters means higher peaks for people near one. Still you have to be cautious what studies you believe.
- Ackley 13y agoWhere do you think interferences come from?
- noonespecial 13y agoImagine that frequency is color (actually true). Tuning is searching for that color. So you, the receiver, are tasked with finding a (for example) blue light and counting the blinks. Easy until you surround that blinking blue light with 1000 more just like it all blinking at different speeds. Complete the metaphor with the fact that directionality is hard or often impractical so imagine your field of focus is slightly blurred, like looking through the viewfinder of a camera that isn't focused. All that other blue light is interference. There are only 11 or so distinct "colors" in 802.11g and some of them are close to each other and quite hard to tell apart.
- tomstuart 13y agoSee also Timo Arnall et al’s work on light painting wifi: http://www.nearfield.org/2011/02/wifi-light-painting http://www.nearfield.org/2011/02/wifi-light-painting
- lcedp 13y agoDoesn't seem very legit to me. Firstly, if wi-fi would be visible, you still wouldn't be able to see it all like we can't see visible laser ray unless there is dust/water/something in the air. It should be reflected from something to be seen. But let's suppose it's just visible per se.. Ok, colors represent waves, but they don't look like 3-5 inches, more like meters on some photos. Secondly, signal strength should dramatically decrease over distance. In two meters it should be four times as dark as in one meter, in 10 meters it should be 100 times darker. Thirdly, on many pictures waves don't seem to disperse properly. Looks like everybody's using a very advance ridiculously narrow-range antennas.
- sp332 13y ago"In two meters it should be four times as dark as in one meter" But our eyes compensate for inverse square laws, and have a logarithmic response to light.
- lcedp 13y agoOk, point taken. It is vaguely a logarithm function. But what's the base of this logarithm? How much is it curved? Just try light up a big room which has no windows with a candle - you can see pretty well at the distance of your hand, but in a few meters from you - it's plain darkness. I expect wi-fi waves to be like this. Using the grath "Perceived Brightness" at [1] we have roughly the following table: Distance/Actual/Perceived Brightness 1/100/100 2/25/~55 4/6.25/~30 [1] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/bright.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/bright.htm...
- sp332 13y agoLuminous efficacy depends on wavelength, with the eye being most sensitive to 555nm (green) light at 683 lumens/Watt. Most wifi setups max out at 1W (I think?), so if the eye were as sensitive to wifi signals as to green light, we could get 683 lumens which is about the same as a 60W incandescent bulb.
- 13y ago
- nemo1618 13y agoI've been thinking about making a project out of this for a while. Lots of people have already hacked themselves to gain a "sixth sense" -- the ability to detect electric fields via magnetic vibrations. In today's world, wouldn't the ability to detect a strong WiFi signal be a bit more useful? Realistically the result wouldn't resemble these illustrations at all; a simple signal strength -> vibration intensity converter would be more practical.
- mhurron 13y ago> Lots of people have already hacked themselves to gain a "sixth sense" -- the ability to detect electric fields via magnetic vibrations. What?
- krapp 13y agoApparently, Google 'magnetic implant'. I remember reading about it here: http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087?currentPage=all http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087?current... Doesn't seem all that useful from what i've read though, unless you're an electrical engineer.
- 6d0debc071 13y agoSome people implant, I believe it's a small neodine, magnet under their skin with the idea that they can feel electrical fields.
- VLM 13y agoIts almost as effective, much cheaper, faster, zero risk of infection, and easier to reverse to just stick a magnet in the end of a latex/nitrile/whatever glove and wear it for awhile. I'd strongly encourage trying it. Been there done that. The glove thing, not the implant thing. Cheap and fun. You will "stick" yourself to chunks of steel and much simpler to fix that with a glove. It gets boring/annoying after a couple hours, at which point you're pretty happy to peel off the glove; I imagine implants are less convenient. And its magnetic fields not electrical. Over a couple hundred volts/cm you can feel electrical fields without any implants or whatever, assuming you have arm hair. I'm talking about something distinct from feeling current flow, a totally different scenario. You can feel CHANGING magnetic fields if they're immense, like in a MRI.
- Dirlewanger 13y agoNow throw in all the radiation coming from everyone's cell phones communicating with the WAP, the numerous radio waves in the atmosphere, UV light from the sun, other sources I'm probably forgetting, etc...that'd be a much more impressive representation.
- TomGullen 13y agoI don't know if these pictures make much sense really. Radio waves are part of the light spectrum but not part of the visible light spectrum, so it doesn't make much sense to represent it visually in this way. If an artist pictured grass as if it reflected radio waves and not visible light waves, we'd have a interesting/weird picture but one without much value.
- sp332 13y agoFirst, it's more of an art project than a science project. Second, it lets you see wifi strength! That's cool! NASA releases false-color images of stuff all the time, where they remap various wavelengths to visible colors. e.g. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/pia00032.html http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/pia00032.html
- roc 13y ago> "If an artist pictured grass as if it reflected radio waves and not visible light waves, we'd have a interesting/weird picture but one without much value." It wouldn't even be necessarily interesting or weird. It would only need to look like grass that has another set of lights shone on it, which is pretty pedestrian. The 'weirdness' of these images comes from the fairly arbitrary assignment of colors to these wavelengths-we-can't-normally-see. Which is utterly unrelated to the original spectra. One could 'false color' a scene by arbitrarily shifting color assignments for normally visible wavelengths and achieve something just as visually 'interesting/weird'.
- lukeschlather 13y agoWe actually do have a general understanding of what materials absorb/transmit/reflect radio waves, so if you said "What would this scene look like if you moved the visible light spectrum to where WiFi is" you could actually create a meaningful and even potentially useful picture.
- kineticfocus 13y agoWhile on the topic... http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/who-knew-radio-waves-could-look-this-good http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/who-knew-radio-waves... http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2009-10/rfid-waves-vizualized-and-demystified-using-led-wand http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2009-10/rfid-waves-viz...
- VLM 13y agoVery creative pictures, but if you want the real thing, merely visit: http://www.ansys.com/ http://www.ansys.com/ and bring a thick wallet (like, don't bother unless you've got 4 to 5 figures). And a lot of patience because the real tools have a dwarf fortress shaped learning curve. A fine idea would be an open source-ish replacement for these type of tools. Good luck avoiding the patent minefield. Its interesting that there are lots of really good and popular and "famous" computer algebra manipulation programs competing with mathematica type proprietary software, but not much free good, popular and "famous" finite element analysis and electromagnetic modeling type stuff.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- timini 13y agoIt's very strange that the facebook comments on the Vice article are more critical of the project than the comments here. What's up hacker news? Can't you see how juvenile this work is?
- bbwharris 13y agoIt would look like light from a lightbulb. We already see light in the specific frequency peak of the sun. If we could see wifi, it would be like a lightbulb that dimly appears to pass through walls.
- incision 13y agoI was hoping for something more than an RF crime sketch. This recent EM visualization was pretty cool and a bit more substantial. "Through a series of experiments in photographic and lighting techniques followed by customising an Android phone to act as an EMF indicator and then coding our own app in Processing we were able to visualize how these fields change over objects." http://vimeo.com/65321968 http://vimeo.com/65321968
- ANH 13y agoIgnoring the images, the physical descriptions in this seem badly wrong. For instance, can any WiFi modulation scheme be described as, "The crests of waves is [sic] translated to a 1 by a computer, and the troughs equal a 0."?
- superpanic 13y agoThe Wifi Camera http://www.ntticc.or.jp/Archive/2008/Light_InSight/Works/wificameraobscura.html http://www.ntticc.or.jp/Archive/2008/Light_InSight/Works/wif...