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Design

Artist Turns Invisible Cell Phone Signals Into Colorful 3D Maps

Though plenty of folks are walking around (a lot more than you'd think) worrying about the invisble rays cell phones emit (and their effects on humans)--who knew they were actually pretty beautiful? Recently artist Nickolay Lamm set out to show us what Wi-Fi would look like if we could actually view the invisible beams, and has now followed it up by using vivid colors to highlight the empheral cell phone signals that surround us.

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Not merely just a fun hypothetical art project, Lamm enlisted Danilo Erricolo, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (U of Illinois, Chicago) and Fran Harackiewicz, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Southern Illinois U, Carbondale) to help make the projections as accurate as possible.

On how they came up with the charts:

"A regular, hexagonal grid of cellular base-station sites is conceptualized..with stations at the corners of the hexagons. The area within each sector antenna radiation pattern has different users being assigned different frequencies and their signals combine to form a single perceived color in that instant," said the scientists. "Different channel combinations from sector to sector are indicated by different colors. The channel combinations shown are not static, but rather change rapidly in time as different users are assigned different channels. But, if you were to take a photo of these rapid changes, you'd likely see a wide array of colors as seen in the illustration[s]."

Below, the group highlighted cell phone usage in various cities across the country:

Chicago.

New York.

Washington D.C.

Image via Cisco

The above illustration estimates cell antenna radiation by assuming a certain demonstrated radiation pattern (ie. wide when viewed from the top, and thin when viewed from the side). Using this as a base for hypothesis, the group set out using available cell photo usage data to make their projection maps.

Paranoia has never looked so gorgeous folks~

via Gizmodo