It’s a running joke at Google that you can spend your whole career not knowing what the people nearby you are doing, or even who they are. (In fact, I continue to harbor a dream about creating an AR overlay that would solve this, but that’s another story.) As it happens, I just discovered that my teammate Bill has been making some really cool augmented reality experiments, including the open source Flight Paths:
Flight Paths is an experiment that transforms your room into a flight path visualization. Touch any horizontal surface and explore as flights take off from JFK or SFO and fly around your space. Learn more at g.co/arexperiments
Continual note to self: Ask people more about what they’re doing!
[YouTube]
I wish somebody would create and application that would visualise radio waves at different frequencies. I teach students basic radio and it is very hard to describe to students how radio signals leave aerials and float (!) off into free space. I’ve been around radio frequency (RF) saves all my life but still cannot imagine these mystical waves in my mind’s eye.
Mystical indeed. My friend learned radio repair in the Navy, and his instructor opened the class by saying (in full R. Lee Ermey voice, naturally), “This stuff uses FM technology. That stands for ‘F’ing Magic,’ which is all you people need to know about it…”