Seeing the Invisible World of WiFi
We spend every day surrounded by wireless signals but never actually see them. WiFi, Bluetooth, phones, smart watches and IoT devices are constantly chatting away over radio waves that are completely invisible to our eyes.
An engineering artist who goes by the name Rootkid decided to change that. They built a sculptural installation called Spectrum Slit that literally turns radio waves into light. It does not give you superhuman vision, but it does show you what the hidden world of wireless activity in a room might look like.
Instead of being a wearable device like goggles, Spectrum Slit is a hardware setup built around a software defined radio and a custom light structure. It is mounted on a U shaped steel frame that instantly gives off strong Control style sci fi vibes. The moment you power it on in a modern home, it lights up like a Christmas tree.
How Spectrum Slit Works
At the heart of Spectrum Slit is a software defined radio. This kind of device lets you tune into a wide range of radio frequencies and process them in software instead of fixed hardware. Rootkid focuses on two of the most familiar wireless bands used in homes today.
- The 2.4 GHz band commonly used by WiFi and Bluetooth
- The 5 GHz band used by modern WiFi networks and other wireless tech
The installation continuously scans these ranges and samples the signal strength across the spectrum. Every bit of radio frequency activity is measured in real time as numbers that represent how intense the signals are at each slice of the band.
Those numbers are then mapped to 64 luminous filaments arranged along the U shaped frame. Each filament represents a small part of the frequency spectrum. If the local signal strength in that slice is high the filament glows brighter. If it is quieter it dims.
The end result looks like a living bar graph of wireless activity. Instead of lines on a screen you get strands of light in the room. When nothing much is happening on the network the structure sits there with a gentle glow. But as soon as someone comes home and starts streaming shows chatting online or gaming it ramps up into a full on light storm.
In the video Rootkid shows moments where the installation becomes so bright it almost looks like an electric heater bolted to the wall instead of an art piece delicately listening to WiFi traffic.
From Art Piece to RGB PC Idea
For PC gamers and hardware enthusiasts Spectrum Slit is more than just a cool sculpture. It is a creative example of what you can do when you mix radio tech, live data and visual flair. It is not hard to imagine similar ideas being brought straight into a gaming setup.
Many gaming PCs already use RGB lighting in cases, fans, RAM and even motherboards. Right now that lighting usually cycles through preset colours, stays static, or maybe reacts to something simple like CPU temperature or audio levels. Spectrum Slit suggests a more data driven and nerdy approach.
Imagine your RGB setup reacting in real time to what your PC is actually doing.
- Lights that pulse with storage activity when your SSD is loading game levels
- Colour coded channels for RAM usage, CPU load and GPU usage
- Brightness tied to network traffic so your case glows harder when you are in the middle of an intense online match
You could assign different colours to different components. For example blue for storage, red for RAM, green for your CPU or GPU. During a heavy gaming session it would probably turn into a chaotic light show but it would be very satisfying to see your hardware performance represented directly through light.
That idea also ties into the rig mentioned in the article. The writer jokes about describing their own gaming and work PC as if it were an art installation. It runs an Intel Core Ultra 7 265K CPU and a GeForce RTX 4080 Super GPU. On its own it is just a powerful PC but if you described it like an art critic you could turn its component choices, the lack of over the top RGB and even the marketing hype around future CPUs into a tongue in cheek artistic statement about modern tech culture.
Whether or not you care about art theory there is a genuine takeaway for gamers. Our systems are already full of sensors and live metrics. We track frame rates, CPU and GPU temps, clock speeds, fan curves and network latency. Projects like Spectrum Slit show how visualizing that data can be more than just a graph in a monitoring app. With a bit of DIY work and software you could turn your gaming PC into a living dashboard of performance that also looks awesome.
At its core, Spectrum Slit asks us to reconsider how quiet and still our tech spaces really are. What looks like a calm bedroom or office is actually full of nonstop electromagnetic activity. By translating those invisible waves into light, the project exposes an artificial storm that is always around us, created by our own devices.
For PC hardware fans that message resonates. Behind every clean tempered glass side panel there is constant invisible work happening. Cores boosting, memory fetching data, GPUs pushing frames, routers juggling packets. Whether you turn that into a wall mounted WiFi sculpture or a custom RGB controller, there is a lot of inspiration here for making that hidden action visible and fun.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/making-the-invisible-visible-this-engineering-artists-creation-shows-the-incredible-level-to-which-modern-devices-fill-our-world-with-radio-waves/
