There’s a part of your MacBook that even you, as the most skilled Apple technician, has never seen before.
It involves something common to not just your MacBook, but a PC too. And an iPhone. And a radio.
It’s an electromagnetic field.
And instead of being a terrible textbook diagram or drawing, it has actually been mapped out—and it’s beautiful.
Two students, Luke Sturgeon and Shamik Ray, of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, came up with an unusual project:
To get their images, Sturgeon and Ray holed themselves up in a pitch-black, totally silent room for three days to experiment with different visualizations and processes. They ended up creating their own Android app in Processing that would allow them draw and map EMFs. The phone, with its built-in magnetic sensors, acted as a sort of “light brush” that reacted based on the strength of the EMF being read. To capture the streak of light coming from the radio, they would slowly drag the phone over the device and wait for the long exposure image to process.
The result? Gentle, spindly, hallucinatory waves in rainbow colors emanating from your MacBook’s surface.
Hopefully, this artistic display can translate to better understanding and monitoring of electromagnetic fields from these devices—and how that can create more powerful and efficient future technologies.