It'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?
What If You Could See WiFi?
11–20 of 44 posts
Re: What If You Could See WiFi?
#12Doesn'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 d…
"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.
Re: What If You Could See WiFi?
#13I'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 conver…
> Lots of people have already hacked themselves to gain a "sixth sense" -- the ability to detect electric fields via magnetic vibrations.
What?
Re: What If You Could See WiFi?
#14I'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 conver…
> Lots of people have already hacked themselves to gain a "sixth sense" -- the ability to detect electric fields via magnetic vibrations. What?
Apparently, Google 'magnetic implant'. I remember reading about it here:
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.
Re: What If You Could See WiFi?
#15It 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.
Re: What If You Could See WiFi?
#16I'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 conver…
> Lots of people have already hacked themselves to gain a "sixth sense" -- the ability to detect electric fields via magnetic vibrations. What?
Some people implant, I believe it's a small neodine, magnet under their skin with the idea that they can feel electrical fields.
Re: What If You Could See WiFi?
#17I'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 conver…
> Lots of people have already hacked themselves to gain a "sixth sense" -- the ability to detect electric fields via magnetic vibrations. What?
By implanting a small magnet normally in a finger, moving your finger through an electric field causes small movement of the magnet, so you can 'feel' electric fields.
e.g.
http://gizmodo.com/5895555/i-have-a-magnet-implant-in-my-fin...
But there's been a number of people who've done it.
Re: What If You Could See WiFi?
#18Doesn'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 d…
"signal strength should dramatically decrease over distance."
One of the very few things they got right from a physics perspective is your eyes respond vaguely logarithmically. Its supposedly not really, deep in the decimal points theres a buried power law factor and a buried linear factor at low levels, but close enough to log for all astronomical purposes. They worked with an astro-biologist per the article; I assume this is the "astro-" portion contribution.
Google for astronomical magnitude and there's also some interesting quantitative chemical analysis stuff having to do with light adsorption. In my misbegotten youth I spent a lot of time in a chem lab squirting weird stuff into sample tubes and hovering over an ancient spectrophotometer. A spectrophotometer is kind of like what an EE would call a RF network analyzer, but for light waves, sort of. At least that's the best EE analogy I can come up with. Eventually I spent most of my lab time daydreaming about getting home to play with electronics and computers; why was I trying to become a chemist? It was pretty interesting stuff to experience in retrospect.
The visibility is... questionable. Google for "clear air return" and WSR-88d and stuff like that. A "decent" wx radar is sensitive enough to get at least some return from turbulence. How do you know its not just ground clutter? Because the doppler shift matches the direction and speed (more or less) of ground instruments. The questionable bit is clear air return is a bazzilion dB reflection loss below actual real reflectors so it would be incredibly faint compared to actual reflectors.
Also the humorous artistic waves don't show multipath like real waves. Not unusual in an urban environment to end up multipath limited not raw sig strength limited, at least in other applications; donno if wifi is usually limited like that.
Re: What If You Could See WiFi?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Lots of people have already hacked themselves to gain a "sixth sense" -- the ability to detect electric fields via magnetic vibrations. What?
Some people implant, I believe it's a small neodine, magnet under their skin with the idea that they can feel electrical fields.
Its 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.
Re: What If You Could See WiFi?
#20While on the topic... http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/who-knew-radio-waves... http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2009-10/rfid-waves-viz...
Very creative pictures, but if you want the real thing, merely visit:
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.