I got fitted for contact lenses. The “fitting” pair were used to measure and adjust. They didn’t have an actual prescription. However, they gave me super-human magnified vision for anything closer than a foot to my face. It was clearer than anything that could be achieved with lenses/magnification outside the eye. It was like having microscopes for eyes.
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.
blacksmith_tb · 4h ago
Sounds fun, but various kinds of jeweler's loupes and magnifying glasses seem less invasive then needing to stick the lenses directly in your eyes? I wore contacts in my 20s, but don't miss all the mess these days.
Calwestjobs · 1h ago
or just webcam + display ;) seem you two too old lol.
Fr0styMatt88 · 20m ago
One of the upcoming rumoured new Apple Vision Pro accessibility features will apparently be providing a magnified vision area.
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.
mncharity · 1h ago
> Humans cannot perceive infrared light due to the physical thermodynamic properties of photon-detecting opsins.
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.
this can be used in future by car drivers. illuminating road in front by IR light, which is invisible to ordinary human, so you do not disturb people, animals with visible light of headlights
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.
ArnoVW · 8h ago
Synopsis:
Humans cannot perceive infrared light due to the physical thermodynamic properties of photon-detecting opsins. However, the capability to detect invisible multispectral infrared light with the naked eye is highly desirable. Here, we report wearable near-infrared (NIR) upconversion contact lenses (UCLs) with suitable optical properties, hydrophilicity, flexibility, and biocompatibility. Mice with UCLs could recognize NIR temporal and spatial information and make behavioral decisions. Furthermore, human participants wearing UCLs could discriminate NIR information, including temporal coding and spatial images. Notably, we have developed trichromatic UCLs (tUCLs), allowing humans to distinguish multiple spectra of NIR light, which can function as three primary colors, thereby achieving human NIR spatiotemporal color vision. Our research opens up the potential of wearable polymeric materials for non-invasive NIR vision, assisting humans in perceiving and transmitting temporal, spatial, and color dimensions of NIR light.
wing-_-nuts · 6h ago
Yeah boss, I'm gonna need an ELI5 and potential use cases here
avidiax · 1h ago
Seems like it would be good for marking cards. Make some cards reflect in the NIR. These contacts don't focus, however, so you can't get a clear perception of where the NIR is coming from.
bobsmooth · 6h ago
Contact lens converts IR to visible light. Use cases include night vision and seeing if your tv remote is working.
Mindless2112 · 6h ago
> However, detecting environmental NIR information in the natural conditions at night without NIR illumination still remains challenging, requiring further advancements in material science and optical design.
Sadly no night vision contact lenses yet.
alejoar · 5h ago
Well, using an IR flashlight will light the path only for the contact lenses wearer, so still pretty cool and plausible.
potato3732842 · 6h ago
Identifying things that aren't the right temperature a trillions of dollars problem spread across many industries.
Though I think perhaps glasses are a better form factor for such tech.
chankstein38 · 2h ago
This is what I was thinking. I already wear glasses. I wonder if there's a coating or something I can get applied that would add this.
bediger4000 · 6h ago
> Mice with UCLs
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.
vlachen · 2h ago
I dunno, I think a mouse would be far less likely to react by throwing hands than a human, plus, a mouse can be muzzled to protect against their primary weapon.
unsupp0rted · 7h ago
> However, the capability to detect invisible multispectral infrared light with the naked eye is highly desirable.
What would be some practical (or fun) uses of this?
kridsdale1 · 5h ago
Military use.
drewbeck · 6h ago
I love this line. The confidence! As if humans have of course wanted IR visibility for ever.
kridsdale1 · 5h ago
In the past, when armies faced each other on a front, activity halted at night.
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.
cryptonector · 5h ago
IIUC the contact lenses in TFA don't upconvert sufficiently long wavelength IR, so it's not going to be unaided night vision just quite yet.
LtdJorge · 5h ago
I think you'd just need a couple of IR sources, can be put in a headband like 2 flashlights, one on each side. Even if you don't see much, any improvements in pitch darkness would be great.
potato3732842 · 6h ago
Imagine being able to detect every situation where heat is a potential indicator of either problems or a system working as intended by simply looking at it.
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.
hollerith · 5h ago
But the OP is about near-infrared (NIR) light. Sensitive instruments for detecting NIR can only detect objects hotter than 440 deg F (according to an LLM I just consulted) and even then longer wavelengths are the preferred wavelengths for detection: NIR doesn't start becoming the preferred wavelength till the object gets up to at least 800 deg F.
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.
potato3732842 · 4h ago
>NIR doesn't start becoming the preferred wavelength till the object gets up to at least 800 deg F.
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?
hollerith · 2h ago
I can't understand the question.
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.
readthenotes1 · 3h ago
Better vision at night, or during cloudy or Dusty conditions. Every truck driver should have them.
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...
dvh · 5h ago
If we pass infrared through nonlinear material, will it produce distortion, which in turn will create higher harmonics which will be in the visible spectrum?
amacbride · 5h ago
Infravision! (For you D&D nerds out there.)
RicoElectrico · 7h ago
As I expected, it needs additional optics to be useful. Consider a sheet of fluorescent film you put on your eyeball. If there's an omnidirectional point source of light, it would excite the whole film virtually uniformly. Hence the upconversion contact lens needs to lie on some sort of a focal plane to be useful.
fellowniusmonk · 7h ago
so would wearing these contacts paired with glasses to serve as a focal plain work?
ipsum2 · 5h ago
.
kadoban · 5h ago
This is a contact lens, not surgery.
metalman · 6h ago
resolution is too low for any practical use case
another article pointed out that it makes no difference if you have your eyes closed, as these things work behind your eyelids
this is long way from bieng able to help you tell if your date is interested or what
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.
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.
Sadly no night vision contact lenses yet.
Though I think perhaps glasses are a better form factor for such tech.
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.
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...