Glowing Orbs Reveal GPS Strength Wherever You Take Them

NewImage

Via Wired.

Timo Arnall is something of a magician: The designer is very good at making the invisible visible. In the past six years, he’s turned Wi-Fi signals into light paintings, visualized RFID signals as as glowing drawings, and he’s gone behind the scenes at one of the world’s largest server farms. Now, in a new addition to his Immaterials series, he’s showing us what GPS looks like.

In Satellite Lamps, Anall, along with Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen, investigates what he describes as “one of the most important, yet completely normalized, modern infrastructures.” It’s true—despite our obliviousness, GPS surrounds us everywhere we go. It’s what powers our most important apps; it’s the backbone of us orienting ourselves in the modern world.

The little blue circle you see when you open your maps app is the product of a network of satellites beaming waves down from nearly 12.5 thousand miles into the sky. As those satellites orbit the planet at fast speeds, their signals bob in and out of strength. To visualize the notoriously glitchy technology, Arnall and his team built lamps embedded with GPS receivers. As the strength of signal wavers in and out, the glowing orbs become brighter or dimmer. The stronger the signal, the brighter the lamp.

Over the course of two years, the designers set up shop in 50 different locations around Olso, Norway. They rigged their lights in open fields, in fjords, alongside underpasses and inside buildings and record what happened. In the atmospheric time lapse film, you watch as the lamps flicker in and out of brightness, as though a ghost were flitting in and out of proximity.

This is a physical representation of the finicky nature of satellites. It’s a visualization of those moments when you emerge from the subway or pass by a tall building and find yourself dealing with a disoriented blue dot. But it’s also more than that. It’s a way to instill awe in a process that we rarely think about, because truly, the fact that the phones in our pocket are in constant communication with something in space, really is pretty cool.

Read more.


Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards

Join Adafruit on Mastodon

Adafruit is on Mastodon, join in! adafruit.com/mastodon

Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.

Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.

Join us every Wednesday night at 8pm ET for Ask an Engineer!

Join over 36,000+ makers on Adafruit’s Discord channels and be part of the community! http://adafru.it/discord

CircuitPython – The easiest way to program microcontrollers – CircuitPython.org


Maker Business — “Packaging” chips in the US

Wearables — Enclosures help fight body humidity in costumes

Electronics — Transformers: More than meets the eye!

Python for Microcontrollers — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: Silicon Labs introduces CircuitPython support, and more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi

Adafruit IoT Monthly — Guardian Robot, Weather-wise Umbrella Stand, and more!

Microsoft MakeCode — MakeCode Thank You!

EYE on NPI — Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey

New Products – Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! — #NewProds 7/19/23 Feat. Adafruit Matrix Portal S3 CircuitPython Powered Internet Display!

Get the only spam-free daily newsletter about wearables, running a "maker business", electronic tips and more! Subscribe at AdafruitDaily.com !



No Comments

No comments yet.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.