In this viral videowhat looks like a spider in a jar jumps every time the girl filming it in the foreground touches her iPhone screen to bring the image into focus.
It is not actually a spider, but a species of solifuge, arachnids of a different order than spiders and scorpions which, to complicate matters a bit, are commonly known as “camel spiders” or “wind scorpions”. They do not know how to weave, they are not poisonous and can be distinguished from spiders by their huge jaws. Maybe that’s why they’re so scary?
Be that as it may, these girls put a solifuge in a jar and discovered that it seemed to get stressed when they tried to take photos of it with an iPhone 12 Pro, the first model that included LiDAR in the rear camera. The LiDAR scanner fires infrared beams to measure the distance to different objects in an image and to interpret their depth.
The human eye can see what is known as visible light, electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths from 380 to 750 nm. Infrared is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength longer than visible light, and therefore invisible to the human eye. The TV remote works with infrared that we can sometimes capture with the mobile camera. The Face ID system of the iPhone’s front camera launches thousands of invisible points in the infrared to study the features of your face. The iPhone LiDAR Scanner works similarly with pulses of a wavelength of 940 nm.
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Many animals, such as snakes, bats, bedbugs, mosquitoes, and some beetle species, can see in the near infrared, and that is possibly what is happening with this solifuge, as it gives the impression that the LiDAR beams they are taking you by surprise.
However, arachnids and many other insects are best known for their ability to see ultraviolet radiation. The wandering spider, for example, can perceive wavelengths between 389.9 and 654 nm, which would not explain this sensitivity to LiDAR. So what we can make clear from the viral video is that this is not a spider, and that spiders are not known to see in the infrared, but rather in the ultraviolet and green..
And while we don’t know what that solifuge is seeing without serious study to explain it, we can make the invisible, in this case you make it from the iPhone’s LiDAR scanner, become visible with an infrared camera. Curious to see what happens in the infrared when we take the phone out of the pocket.