Shouldn't the title be "WiFi strength visualized" instead of invisible signals caught on Camera?

Its a cool visualization nonetheless, but the title is a little misleading.

I second your motion. Initially I thought that they found a new material that is sensitive to 2.4GHz electromagnetic waves. This train of thought was inspired by the ability of cameras today to capture infrared light. [The old point remote at camera trick].

The title of the original article is "Invisible WiFi Signals Caught on Camera." I thought "Invisible" was too Ripley's-Believe-It-Or-Not-sounding so I removed it while trying to keep as much of the original title as possible intact. Probably a better title would have been "WiFi Signal Strength Caught on Camera" or the one you proposed, but, whats done is done.

I think the title of the original was being criticized (righly), not the title you chose for the HN post.

Supposedly at one point decades ago PARC had a wire in the ceiling that rotated and whose rotational speed was dependent on the amount of packets traveling in the internet cable strung above it.

(apocryphal?) (what is the truth of this?) (is it still there?)

I believe Facebook is supposed to have a restroom in which a white noise privacy background is generated from global friending/unfriending activity.

It was called the "Dangling String": http://books.google.com/books?id=9P5uwNpP1JAC&pg=PA83...

Natalie Jeremijenko made the one at PARC in 1995 as an artist in residence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Jeremijenko#Live_Wire_....

I understand that Twitter's reception desk had birdsong that played when people tweeted, but it became cacophonous at high tweets-per-second.

I'm pretty sure the speakers were still there when we left.

I've heard that story before, except that when I heard it, the network was in one of the MIT Rad Lab buildings.

The full (and HD version) of the video can be found here: http://vimeo.com/20412632

Anyone else remember this being posted this time last year?

Yes, I actually saw it a while back as well. Still cool though!

The artist in me wants to smile, but the RF guy inside says, "Hey, they recreated the radio signal coverage map with fewer dimensions and less useful information!" (chuckle...)

discussion from 644 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2270878

Wouldn't it be easier to assign signal strength to certain GPS-dots and visualize the gathered data on the computer?

Yes, but would be science. The submission is art.

I love the possibilities here. I want to see rows traced out! Make something that looks like a Joy Division album cover. Use a bullet-time array of cameras to make a video. Make an augmented reality layer so you can see it as you wander the area.

Though this is really cool in itself, this has a horribly sensational and misleading title.

Not as cool as the Magnetic Movie: http://vimeo.com/1166968

Instead of vertical, I'd love to be able to see this horizontally overlaid on a map so I could find the weak spots in my house and work.

You can gather data with G-Mon on Android. Iirc it "only" gives you an estimated location and strength of each wifi radio though. Still fun to map.

Very old article.

Darn it, I was working on this too! I guess my project will just have to be that much more original now.

This could server as a mode of expression and art.

Typing "server" instead of "serve" happens to me extremely frequently too (it happened while typing this too), occupational hazard I guess :)

What a simply beautiful idea!