Ehhh… I dunno, man. It’s a great first step and an awesome demonstration of metasurfaces, but NewAtlas is heavily editorializing the outcome, to the point of making the paper’s authors look foolish (if you didn’t know that the authors aren’t making the outlandish claims)

Among NA’s claims: night vision without cooling, and comparison to MCP-based image intensifiers.

The authors successfully upconverted ~1500nm photons to 550nm with high efficiency.

So, not really night vision in the sense of thermal IR (yet) That’s why they don’t need cooling: it isn’t thermal IR, which is more like 9000nm.

But it’s also not the same class of image intensification like in a typical “night vision” goggle/scope:

You get some intensification by up converting IR to vis with high efficiency, while simultaneously passing vis (and the neat effect of combining both in one image without additional processing). You could get like 1-2x intensification from the wider spectrum (using a wider band version of the apparatus—the current one is fairly monochromatic), not 100x by amplifying photon counts.

Newatlas also fails to mention another interesting property: the amplified wavelength is tunable!