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Comment by samplatt | Hacker News Reader

These are gorgeous. Can't go past this without a heads-up for Greg Egan's 2014 short story Seventh Sight, where the protagonists hack their (at the time bleeding-edge tech) eye implants, allowing them to be part of a vanishingly-small group of people that can see into the infrared and ultraviolet.

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I think it was in a Daedalus article that I read a passing reference to a technician who had had an operation for cataracts - the synthetic lens then allowed them to see a little way into the ultraviolet and thus they were able to calibrate a spectrometer "by eye" !

Edit: Ok, I looked it up... from the Daedalus column in New Scientist in May 1969:

"... Daedalus recalls the story of a professor of spectroscopy who lost an eye-lens in an explosion. He was given corrective spectacles with enough UV transparency to let him see some way into this region of the spectrum. Accordingly, he could line up the departmental UV spectrometers by eye, and was much in demand!"

During WWII the british special forces recruited men with glass lenses from cataract surgery who could see ultraviolet strobe lights. They helped smuggle things in and out of Norway by boat. There was a book published on naked eye astronomy in the ultraviolet.

Makes me think of Star Trek's Geordie LaForge, a blind engineer whose VISOR[0] not only gave him vision back, it extended it into IR, UV ranges and beyond[1].

(Curiously, for a show from 1990s, the visualization of what he sees[2] is eerily similar to images produced by misconfigured diffusion models.)

[0] - Then futuristic; these days, I'm rather confident you could hack it up with VR glasses and enough sensors, leaving only the direct brain interface in the realm of sci-fi. Alas, the necessary suite of real sensors is still stupidly expensive AFAIK, way beyond a budget of a hobby project or even a product prototype.

[1] - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/VISOR#Capabilities

[2] - There's some screencaps in the MemoryAlpha article I linked; can't link directly, because the site detects hotlinking.

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