They don’t have the dynamic range of colors to capture all the colors our eyes can see, but they can pick up other types of light that we can’t.
This fact was pointed out in a lot of reviews of the Vision Pro. It’s just about good enough to make you forget you’re in augmented reality but the world looks more dull and lifeless because your eyes see more vibrant colors than small digital sensors.
Are you sure about that?
My understanding is that digital cameras can capture an extremely wide color gamut -- the vibrant colors -- but that the extra information is necessarily thrown away when encoded in sRGB or P3 in your image/video file.
Because we don't have many displays which are capable of showing those ultra-saturated colors, so we don't waste bits on storing them in files either. P3 is an obvious improvement over sRGB that Apple products mostly use now.
If you process RAW files directly from the sensor, I'm pretty sure you get a much wider gamut.
What I'm not entirely sure about is how that gamut maps to the colors our eyes can see -- it's not going to be exactly the same coverage. So I'm not sure where it goes beyond human eye sensitivity, or where it doesn't quite reach it, and to what extent this depends on the sensor technology (e.g. what's in your phone vs. an expensive DSLR vs. a professional cinema camera). Ultimately it's going to come down to the exact precise shape of the frequency curve in each of the R, G and B filters in the color filter array, and how they can be mathematically translated to reflect the human eye's [1, 2].
(And so color vibrancy limitations with the Vision Pro are absolutely going to be coming from the displays before they come from the cameras.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_filter_array#Image_senso...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_management#Color_transfo...
Marketers of things like CCTV cameras love to sow confusion about these things, as NIR-sensitive cameras are extremely cheap while thermal cameras are comparatively expensive.
Humans are not sensitive to NIR because for the vast majority of human existence, any time there was NIR light there was also an abundance of normal visible light, due to a little thing called "the sun"
NIR sensitivity does not improve night vision. That mostly requires a "tapetum lucidum" or reflective layer, more rods than cones (less helpful when you want to see colors in daylight) or just larger, more biologically expensive and vulnerable eyes than necessary.
Your comment and its grandparent are both excellent, but I would like to nitpick a bit here. Technically, NIR sensitivity does improve night vision through the simple mechanism of "detect more wavelengths = detect more total light". It's not thermal imaging, but it is the reason that CCTV cameras often mechanically move their IR filter out of the way when the light falls below some threshold - at that point, sensitivity is more important than color fidelity, so they accept all the light they can get, even nonvisible. Of course this is also often coupled with NIR illumination LEDs.
I do not see any visible light emitting from the remote. This is in a pitch dark room.
Edit: proof, taken in a semi-lit room for clarity: https://imgur.com/a/63FbXjQ
Edit 2: Tested on iPhone 15 Pro selfie camera. It detects IR at the same intensity.
Edit 3: Same as above with a Pixel 8.
Edit 4: I now have my office involved, this is fun. Same with a Samsung S24.
Final Edit: OK, I just went through about 20 colleague's phones, which are various mixes of iPhone and Android, new and old. Testing the front and back camera, every camera on every phone saw the IR light.
If a smartphone camera does not see IR light, this appears to be the exception, not the rule. OK, back to work!
These are all US devices, in case that matters. We don't seem to have an agency that regulates light emissions from cell phones.
I acknowledge that I may be the only person in the world that is this interested in this fact.
[1] https://alexbock.github.io/blog/nir-water-red-wine-compariso...
The dash cam has a video-out port, but unfortunately it appears to be NTSC resolution. I'd love some sort of setup that outputs to >=8" 1080p display attached to my dash. It would help so much in my rural area with wildlife in the road, as well as the constant random pedestrian walking on an unlit rural highway in dark clothing.
Ideally, if I could get great quality, low noise low light video like the VIOFO, I could then start playing with object identification with OpenCV.
1. I worked on such spectral systems in a past military life but don't want to attach something big like a Cadillac FLIR unit, or something expensive, like nearly every viable consumer FLIR option. All the "affordable" consumer FLIR options suffer from low resolution and/or low response time.
When I experimented with connecting two thermal cameras to a VR headset for stereo thermal vision, I used two Seek CompactPRO FastFrame units. They're 320x240@15Hz for $400 which is a lot more usable than the typical 80x60@9Hz consumer thermal, and it's easy to integrate the Android model into custom applications. They also have a 320x240@25Hz model for $1000.
I'm still impatiently waiting for affordable 640x480 thermal cameras, but in my opinion 320x240 at moderate frame rate is past the good-enough threshold to be legitimately useful for high contrast situations like identifying warm-blooded life on the side of a rural road.
> I'd love some sort of setup that outputs to >=8" 1080p display attached to my dash.
The Tesla Cybertruck has an option to display the view from the front bumper camera on the 18.5" main screen, but front camera display is unfortunately not available in any of Tesla's other models. With the proliferation of large touchscreens and camera arrays, more vehicles may support this from the factory soon.
It requires a surprising amount of expertise, effort and money to assemble, calibrate and feed content to a high-end home theater sufficient to correctly deliver even the (currently modest) full capabilities of 4k HDR10+ / DolbyVi$ion. And the home theater content ecosystem is still a mess of mixed, partial implementation of supposed standards.
Implementation of HDR/WCG for web media is currently even less evolved. Despite many newer, high-end laptop, computer and phone screens having decent capabilities, inconsistent file formats, browsers, drivers and OS implementations seem far away from this "just working" for end users.