Immaterials: Light painting WiFi

yourban.no

80 points·jrnkntl··8 comments

Is there a (harmless) chemical that reacts in some visible way to radio waves? It would be interesting to spray that in the street and see a 3d representation of all different signals in the air.

Light requires a lot of energy. WiFi radio waves are really not that strong. Even if there were a chemical like that, its light would be overpowered by street and window lights.

This is one of those ideas that I wish I'd thought of.

Simple - but conceptually brilliant. Bridging a conceptual gap between online communication and the physical world.

Exactly, simple and powerful. Beautiful is the icing on the cake. It is quite some work though.

This is fantastic. It would be really cool to build swarm robots that turn measure out a area. then use some 3d projection to produce a spacial overlay, line and elevation map of all wifi

I wonder if google has enough data from their street view vehicles

For me its the typical university project interaction design students create. To which than the whole world (especially those working in UX/UI design) drools.

s/than/then/

> the whole world drools

So, lots of room to explore, but can you turn a profit? Imagine doing this systematically with 3G. The wireless companies pay big money for this kind of data in GIS systems. Imagine adding "street view" to critical areas.

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