Your brain would essentially be forced to constantly process more visual data than it was used to... more data than human brains in general had evolved to process.
Surely that has consequences.
The other classic is "reverse vision" glasses that flip everything upside down. Takes about 2-6 weeks to rewire your brain, then everything appears normal... until you take them off.
Physiologically speaking, maybe the excess biochemical signaling could lead to fatigued pathways, chemical exhaust toxicity, cell death... but I think that could be overcome with a control plane that permits deactivation, so that you only use it selectively, and that passes the buck, leaving the burden of responsibility with the patient.
In practical use, I think subtle social consequences are a bigger accident waiting to happen, worth more attention than the subsequent, resulting inner well being (or lack thereof) of the post-op recipient.
Little things like having the ability to observe otherwise silent flatulence, notice residual keyboard heat, see through clothing, and perhaps even walls, watching dinner cook, that sort of thing would change the sense of self, sure. If it’s truly harmless, you’ll see an alarming level of adoption.
But it’s the arms race of being left behind, when seemingly the rest of the world gets something like this, and you can’t jump on the bandwagon, leading to an absurd amount of dangerous elective procedures that would likely become the bigger evil.
Suddenly ordinary just isn’t good enough, so what happens next?
If this did work in people, I would let a few waves of early adopters go first. It's a big open question as to how confusing things might be if you were IR/green colorblind.
Another part of me is more thinking "I wonder what unexpected side effects we'll see when we have data from clinically controlled trials of large numbers of people using this technology over timespans of 40-50 years?"
I was an early adopter of a simple sort of body modification - I had a small neodymium disc magnet sheathed in some inert material implanted in a finger.
It was cool and all, but I eventually got it removed because it was sensitive and if the inert sheath ever broke, it'd be bad news. Bodies don't like rare earth metals.
When I got it removed, the person who did it turned out to know the one who put it in (small world), and they told me that the new ones were tiny slivers which were almost impossible to feel, much less remove.
And that wasn't exactly comforting. Mine practically popped out, but a tiny sliver?
Nowadays, I think two or three times about those sorts of 'life hacks'.
No thanks. Not now, not ever.
one thing i wonder, is what happens when you sleep