Awesome idea!

This is awesome!

I've looked at clouds from both sides now.

I think he has the left and right cameras reversed (I suppose it depends your view of the cameras) but other than that I’m thrilled with the idea. I want my ideal house equipped with movable cameras like that. And why not do the same sort of things with microphones?

Then expand the electromagnetic spectrum down to about 500 kHz (I would need to pick up all the AM band of course) and up through cosmic rays. One could either compress it all into the visible or else tune into just a couple octaves. Do the same sort of thing for the audible spectrum and it would be a toy I could play with for weeks. It would be like having the sight and hearing of a god.

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4 thoughts on “Awesome idea!

  1. It’d be cool if somebody set up live stereo feeds from cameras like this. Say, from the tops of a couple of skyscrapers in NYC or SF or Miami, pointing out over the ocean…

  2. There’s a Larry Niven story where the protagonist deduces something about the homeworld of a secretive alien race from the fact they hadn’t considered tidal forces as an explanation for the loss of a expedition to observe a neutron star.

    This cartoon does something similar. As someone who lives near the Cascades, the bigness of clouds seems obvious to me. I don’t need to construct a long baseline stereo imager to appreciate the scale of clouds.

    All that said, it’s a very cool idea and a great XKCD.

    And, yeah, compressing the EM spectrum into the visible range would rock. I’d keep the visible light at it original frequencies. Map radio and microwave into the lower half of the visible specturm. UV on up a ways into the upper. Might want to weight it differently given how much gets through to the Earth’s surface.

  3. I heard of a book of stereographs made from astronomical pictures taken six months apart that make the nearer stars jump right out at you. I believe the book was called “The Parallax View”. I’ve never been able to find it.

  4. Spam comments are coming in one about every two minutes so I’m disabling comments on this one post. If you have a comment you want posted here send it to me in an email with the name (and optional link) you want it posted under.

    blog@joehuffman.org

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