responsivesarchitectures:

Title: Wi-Fi Structures and People Shapes

Category: #realtimecity #sentientcity #datavisualization

Author: Dan Hill

Year: 2008

Url: http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2008/11/wi-fi-structure.html

Description: Whereas urban industry would once have produced thick plumes of smoke or deafening sheets of sound, today’s information-rich environments –like the State Library of Queensland– are places of still, quiet production, with few sensory side-effects. We see people everywhere, faces lit by their open laptops, yet no evidence of their produc- tion. They could be using Facebook, Photoshop, Excel or Processing. Creating a representation of the Wi-Fi could help us understand the phenom- enon better by making the invisible visible via a form of translation. This particular repre- sentation is a 3D model indicating signal strength across the library. Sensing the Wi-Fi like this is almost akin to dowsing –detecting the presence of unseen forces– and mimics the sensation of users attempting to discern where the Wi-Fi signal is strong.