What Wi-Fi Would Look Like If We Could See It 120
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.'"
Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
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 think it's just your dope supplier playing pranks on you.
anyway the picture is cheesimusmaximus. bullshit scifi drawing - the waves would go so fast that it would color just everything in rainbow hues if it worked like that. in the pics it's also quite projected.. along flat wavy planes.
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Did you go to UCSD?
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I have to admit, I was hoping for coloured 3-D clouds -- where it actually mapped the signal strength curve of each channel including reflections from each AP.
I was also hoping that someone had developed a CCD that responded in the WiFi wavelengths instead of visible spectrum. Oh well.... maybe someone will visualize it as flying pigs next.
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Would be pretty cool to have a CCD/CMOS sensor that captured the entire spectrum and you could just add filters to the lens (or in post) select the range you wanted to view. I'd imagine you could produce some pretty interesting images.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Nice one Geordi. Stop going on about how superior your VISOR is. You're blind. We get it.
As a tinfoil hat-smith (Score:4, Funny)
I wish they were visible...
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I thought tinfoil-hatters made their own to avoid being trapped in a government conspiracy to sabotage tinfoil hats? How's the business?
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Re:As a tinfoil hat-smith (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:As a tinfoil hat-smith (Score:4, Insightful)
Still though I agree, this artist is nothing more than an asshat.
And for the next project... (Score:3)
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Thinking about it, the waves travel like light and so should simply be visualised as another colour of light with many point sources.
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TLDR: Ooh, pretty colors.
Re:As a tinfoil hat-smith (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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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.
I had exactly the same reaction. WTF??? He had an expert astrobiologist advisor too... I guess he calls a baker when he wants his hair cut.
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You're thinking of this the wrong way. It's not sound, it's light, captured by a camera. Simply run the resulting image trough a standard camera gamma correction algorithm.
Heck, noise cancelling couldn't possibly work here since it's
Radar (Score:3)
Wifi is just microwave radiation. We already 'see' microwave radiation, it is called 'radar'.
Pictures entirely wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Er.... wifi IS radio... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Er.... wifi IS radio... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, there's a lot of technical errors in the article. All we know for sure, is that he can photoshop rainbows onto photographs. I'd take anything else stated there with a grain of salt.. Most of the "technical" information about wifi in the article is incorrect.
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I wasn't going to read the article after I saw how stupid the pictures were. Apparently WiFi has all the characteristics of colourful soap bubbles.
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Kindly wipe the aspergers from your mouth and note that further down the page he states, "Wifi occupies the radio frequency band of the electromagnetic spectrum between actual radio waves and microwaves".
He is clearly using the term "radio waves" to describe waves in the portion of the RF spectrum reserved for wireless audio receivers, normally modulated either by amplitude or frequency, commonly known as radio.
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It would look like light (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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As best I can figure, you have it exactly right. A wifi antenna would look much like a light-bulb.
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It seems like the obvious thing to do would be to scale the signal to visible light range then show us the result, but I'm guessing that's not artistique enough for the artist.
Though now I'm kind of curious as to what wifi would look like when it's scaled to visible light range.
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This guy is an artist and this is nothing but an excuse for being a dumb fool, that's all. You know how artsy-fartsy people snicker when a non-artistic nerd doesn't know basics of art history and style? Well, that's the same reason that the nerd snickers when an artsy-fartist has no clue about basics of electromagnetics at a freshman introductory level. Both artsy-fartists and nerds should be reminded that while not everyone is interested in the same thing, neither is everyone to be expected to be a complet
Re:It would look like light (Score:4, Informative)
This is just nitpicking, but the wavelengths are HUGE. I understand that it's impossible to depict a wavelength in nanometers without resorting to showing a fuzzy cloud and saying that there's not enough pixels to show the discreet waveforms. tom17 is dead right when he says it would look like light, because all the scattering and reflection and refraction occurs with visible EMF as well as radio.
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The perpendicular waves on an axis got zero to do with I/Q components, sorry. The I and Q components are a way of re-representing the phase and amplitude in a way that's more convenient to further process. There's no such thing as I and Q components once you're outside of your transceiver box, similarly to there being no prime factorization magically appearing on the blackboard every time you write down an integer. Just as prime factorization is a way of representing integers, the I and Q decomposition is a
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This is exactly how it works. The only difference is, at longer wavelength/lower frequencies, the size/density of objects that are considered opaque is higher (a person is roughly large/dense enough to block RF, a toothbrush is not), while each photon is less easily scattered or refracted.
You could even go so far as to say the perceived color also depends upon the channel within the Wi-Fi spectrum, much like the false-colored images of non-visible astronomical imagery (e.g.: Cosmic Microwave Background r [wikimedia.org]
Re: It would look like light (Score:1)
Seems like ray tracing a falsw-color scene with WiFi antennae as the light sources might make for a more useful (though maybe not entirely interesting) visualization...
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Rather, it would look much like the world does now, but lots of things would be translucent/transparent and the IORs for things would be completely different.
You'd also see some phenomena [wikipedia.org] which is much harder to see with the naked eye and visual light.
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There would be a few differences due to the wavelength involved, such as radio shadows having fuzzier edges than light shadows, but you have the basic idea.
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You're spot on. It'd work exactly like light, just much longer wavelength. Speaking in orders of magnitude, 2.4GHz is a 10cm wave, visible light is a 1um wave. The difference is 5 orders of magnitude (100,000).
If we were to see radio waves of such a length, Wi-Fi would be a particularly uninteresting kind of a signal. A Wi-Fi node would look to us like an equivalent of a rather low power indicator lightbulb with some tint applied to the glass. It'd flicker, too. Why incandescent? Because it's broadband, not
Re:Ad supported post... (Score:4, Funny)
Some people (Score:1)
also wonder what the waves in the visible spectrum look like.
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that we can't see them. ;)
Some people can't.
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Unsecured access points ... (Score:2)
So where's the smartphone app? (Score:2)
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.
Is the article confused? (Score:5, Insightful)
>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..."?
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Yeah, I looked at those troughs and crests and said
"Wait, that isn't wifi, I don't see any Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing there, he must have accidentally visualized the NSA scanner waves protecting Washington DC from any stray intelligence"
And then I realized the NSA scanner waves must really work.
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>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..."?
One or two readers might not have the physics or communication theory background to get that. The data is encoded in slight variations in the wave, not in the peaks and troughs of the wave. You can make them closer together or further apart, or change the phase or amplitude, but for every trough there will be a peak and they will always alternate. All the peaks and troughs do is set the frequency band we're operating in (ie 2.4 GHz for wi-fi).
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Yes, the article is very confused. Wifi standards do not measure just the amplitude of one stream to separate ones from zeroes. It has to measure the amplitude of two separate streams as well as their phase angle. The exact method of coding depends on the data rate but in general most methods boil down to Binary Phase-Shift Keying (1 bit per symbol), and Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (2, 4, or 6 bits per symbol for 4-QAM, 16-QAM, and 64-QAM respectively).
can't be interrupted by other signals? (Score:2)
Bah.. Decided entire TFA was trash once I read that line.
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ObTrek (Score:2)
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What is electricity? (Score:2)
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"
Re:What is electricity? (Score:5, Funny)
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Wouldn't it leave the antenna in spheres of waves? (Score:2)
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 poi
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I know what it would look like (Score:1)
Light vs Light (Score:5, Interesting)
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First of all, we would see very little of the "volume", because air doesn't scatter 2.4GHz that much. Maybe the environment would look very lightly foggy. Secondly, we would see objects illuminated by Wifi if they reflect the signal in our direction. Absorbing surfaces would be dark, like a green surface illuminated by a red light. Most non-metal objects would be more or less translucent, but glas would not be as transparent as we know it. Someone should run a detailed model of a park, a house, etc. through
100% inaccurate. It's art and is not reality. (Score:5, Insightful)
No reflections, no lobes from the gain antennas, no blockage from green trees. It's 100% art with 5% reality.
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No reflections, no lobes from the gain antennas, no blockage from green trees.
... lame
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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
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He might be an artist... (Score:2)
Fixed headline (Score:3)
What Wi-Fi Would Look Like If We Could See It, Only... Not
Really wanna know how they'd look in meatspace? (Score:1)
It's blue lines silly! (Score:2)
Completely wrong (Score:2)
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 [cloudfront.net]. 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
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Not just diffraction but, think of the wifi signal from my router hitting my wall. Sure, the plaster reflects some I am sure, but, most passes right through the thin plaster and horse hair, some of it hits the wooden slats, some moves on into free space, some hits nails that hold the slats on, some hits wires behind the wall, or even metal conduit that carries the wires (though we ripped out most of the old BX)
I would expect to see the antena lit up like a light bulb, and around it, dark impressions of wall
I know exactly what it would look like (Score:2)
Watch Alphas, and you can too!
"You have bad breath. Yeah, Cindy Wellin, she said she'd rather lick a toilet seat than kiss you. It got 47 retweets."
It's hard to see waves unless it reflects (Score:2)
What? (Score:2)
Post-DOMA WiFi? (Score:1)
Pollution (Score:1)
RF... the next type of pollution to demonstrate against! 8-)