Sunday Fun: Visualizing the Vibrations of Five Miles of Fiber Optic Cable

This new visualization helps us see the unseen: the underground fiber optic cables that lie beneath campus at Stanford University in California.

1 minute read

May 21, 2017, 5:00 AM PDT

By James Brasuell @CasualBrasuell


Violin

Vavzhynyak Dasha / Shutterstock

The website of Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London is presenting a visualization of a five-mile long, underground fiber optic cable in Palo Alto, California. The visualization translates the different kinds of external events affecting the cable, such as cars driving over the road above. Usually those events are considered noise and are filtered out—this experiment uses the events to witness the environment playing those cables like an instrument.

The visualization is the work of a partnership between V&A and Stamen Design.

Thursday, May 18, 2017 in Victoria & Albert Museum

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I love the variety of courses, many practical, and all richly illustrated. They have inspired many ideas that I've applied in practice, and in my own teaching. Mary G., Urban Planner

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