Near-infrared spatiotemporal color vision enabled by upconversion contact lenses
cell.com
cell.com
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.
Quest 3 has the passthrough API now that lets apps access the camera feeds as well. I’m eagerly awaiting Meta or a third-party to implement something similar.
There’s also other specialist devices for the vision impaired like myself, but as far as I know none of them give you magnified STEREO vision (although maybe the new eSight does, I’m not sure tbh).
There’s also bioptic glasses, but they’re chunky. Honestly give me glasses with micro-OLED displays like the viewfinder on the Sony DSLR cameras attached to a top-tier phone camera sensor and lens construction; my phone zooms in amazingly far yet is thinner than any bioptic or monocular I’ve ever seen.
I’ve looked into building this kind of thing a few times but I think it might be above the components I can get my hands on.
im not sure "VR headsets" have cameras with good enough resolution to provide reliable magnification without AI/ml full of artifacts nonsense.
but you can connect different camera sources to them / to PC they are connected to,
for example some webcams have removable optics, so by removing that lens you get great macro camera, without replacing optics, just removing lens. i used that trick multiple times for reading PCB components type, covered with conformal coating. or with little ingenuity it is possible to replace with different lens altogether.
you should check out mobile phone microphone, where guy put drop of water on mobile phone lens and created microscope. or- lens from laser pointer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOHxNbxm-m4
different angles of incidence of light can make huge difference in legibility, be it for fine work or home.
or changing color(s) can increase contrast in some interiors. or just using one color of light i.e laser flood
Steps: wash hands, peel the pack, put contacts onto the eyes.
Although there are many different types of contact lenses (and fit types, and comfort) and many reasons for their use. For some, glasses just aren’t an option.
I remember walking around later after the sun had gone down, but my eyes were dilated. Around the outdoor lighting and porch lights, I could see everything. It was like I had superpowers and could see in the dark.
Sadly no night vision contact lenses yet.
Though I think perhaps glasses are a better form factor for such tech.
The downsides they seem to ignore, include the literature showing light on the lower end Blue->UV, and light on the upper end to NIR, have direct impact on the endocrine system through light activated pathways in your eye. If you wear a contact lens, this light is blocked, the same goes for laser eye surgery where a artificial lens is used.
John Ott, and Fritz Hollwich pioneered early studies on photobiology, and funding for it has been sparse despite Asia's myopia crisis; which statistics show generally increased dramatically shortly after blue LEDs came to market in the late 90s, and appear correlated with exposure.
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.
it is as simple as preventing movement ye?
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...
or it can be made into display, you project IR image onto contact lenses, which converts that into visible light. if particle size is small enough.
im not sure about "efficiency" of such lens, we would need more watts to display something on this lens than we would need to project direct to eye. so im not sure if that difference is big enough to not be suitable for wearables or not.
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...
Instead of a standard bayer filter you have these applied as filters, letting you map NIR into the visible spectrum and then capturing it using standard silicon sensors.
Though I believe quantum nano dots are already used there.
The money will start pouring in if you can get this idea to work but with with thermal IR; those cameras are 2-3 decades behind visible light cameras because of the need for custom (non-silicon) sensors and tiny (by comparison) market.
It works like those glow-in-the-dark stickers that you charge up under a light, then take into a dark room to glow.
Except the IR card would not glow until hit by infrared, like from your TV remote. Then it would light up red as the "charged up" energy would kick infrared up into the visible spectrum. (or probably vice versa)