I don't know if these pictures make much sense really. Radio waves are part of the light spectrum but not part of the visible light spectrum, so it doesn't make much sense to represent it visually in this way.
If an artist pictured grass as if it reflected radio waves and not visible light waves, we'd have a interesting/weird picture but one without much value.
"If an artist pictured grass as if it reflected radio waves and not visible light waves, we'd have a interesting/weird picture but one without much value."
It wouldn't even be necessarily interesting or weird. It would only need to look like grass that has another set of lights shone on it, which is pretty pedestrian. The 'weirdness' of these images comes from the fairly arbitrary assignment of colors to these wavelengths-we-can't-normally-see. Which is utterly unrelated to the original spectra.
One could 'false color' a scene by arbitrarily shifting color assignments for normally visible wavelengths and achieve something just as visually 'interesting/weird'.
We actually do have a general understanding of what materials absorb/transmit/reflect radio waves, so if you said "What would this scene look like if you moved the visible light spectrum to where WiFi is" you could actually create a meaningful and even potentially useful picture.
First, it's more of an art project than a science project. Second, it lets you see wifi strength! That's cool! NASA releases false-color images of stuff all the time, where they remap various wavelengths to visible colors. e.g. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/pia00032.html
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I don't know if these pictures make much sense really. Radio waves are part of the light spectrum but not part of the visible light spectrum, so it doesn't make much sense to represent it visually in this way.
If an artist pictured grass as if it reflected radio waves and not visible light waves, we'd have a interesting/weird picture but one without much value.
It wouldn't even be necessarily interesting or weird. It would only need to look like grass that has another set of lights shone on it, which is pretty pedestrian. The 'weirdness' of these images comes from the fairly arbitrary assignment of colors to these wavelengths-we-can't-normally-see. Which is utterly unrelated to the original spectra.
One could 'false color' a scene by arbitrarily shifting color assignments for normally visible wavelengths and achieve something just as visually 'interesting/weird'.
We actually do have a general understanding of what materials absorb/transmit/reflect radio waves, so if you said "What would this scene look like if you moved the visible light spectrum to where WiFi is" you could actually create a meaningful and even potentially useful picture.
First, it's more of an art project than a science project. Second, it lets you see wifi strength! That's cool! NASA releases false-color images of stuff all the time, where they remap various wavelengths to visible colors. e.g. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/pia00032.html