What would be some practical (or fun) uses of this?
You gain a huge advantage if you can infiltrate to sabotage or assassinate the enemy camp in a way that you can see them but they can’t see you.
See the Japanese foxhole assaults on various island fronts.
It would be a wildly valuable tool to any industry that does things. Currently such work is mostly done on a spot basis with IR temp guns and cameras.
Imagine being able to see a failing conveyor bearing from across a facility or a low pressure tire as it rolls by.
The sun emits tons of NIR, so if this tech has a practical application, I'm guessing it is in detecting objects outdoors during the daytime that look distinctive in NIR and do not look distinctive in visible light, e.g., maybe military hardware covered by fabric or camouflage netting.
My understanding is that due to the relative bell curve of emitted wavelengths a hot object should still look "funny" in the same way that a cherry red piece of iron still looks like iron, just different. Is that not true for NIR?
But the spectrum of a hot object is not a bell curve. Specifically, there is a sharp cut-off such that there are basically no photons with wavelength below the cut-off. An incandescent light bulb of the type people used in houses in the 1980s and before for example produces a very small amount of UVA, but basically no UVB, UVC, x-rays or lower wavelengths.
Every search&rescue or police officer should have them although I suspect for firefighters it might not help.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if Mr money mustache can make a frugality case to wearing ir contact lenses instead of having lights on at night.
Instead of splashing people with UV paint and using black lights, just party in the dark.
As people age, one of the common complaints is the degradation of low light vision. This will help some.
At least some hunters I know have night vision goggles for going after wild hogs. They could just wear the contacts...
I seriously just wanted to get a pair for fine vision tasks like soldering. It made me wonder what type of other “vision augmentation” things might be doable with existing tech. There’s probably a market for devices like this even for those with normal/perfect vision.
Seeing near-NIR without pointing a laser at your eye is interesting, but "cannot perceive"?
It's dim, yes. But there are perception reports well beyond 1000 nm (like 1.3 or 1.5 um). People see NIR ophthalmoscopes. I fuzzily recall a DIY attempt to wear a NIR bandpass filter, to make bright day into dark-adapted near-NIR night. And two-photon sensitivity[1] can level off the single-photon sensitivity log curve above 900 nm.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004269892...
ArnoVW•7h ago
wing-_-nuts•5h ago
bobsmooth•5h ago
Mindless2112•5h ago
Sadly no night vision contact lenses yet.
alejoar•4h ago
potato3732842•5h ago
Though I think perhaps glasses are a better form factor for such tech.
chankstein38•1h ago
avidiax•9m ago
bediger4000•5h ago
Holy moly, putting contacts on mice?!?! It's just this side of impossible to put contacts on another human, and not much easier putting them on yourself.
That's dedication to science.
vlachen•1h ago