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Seeing Color in the Night
Roland Piquepaille writes "In 'Things that show color in the night,' the Boston Globe reports that a company named Tenebraex is helping color blind people to travel. But it's also developing goggles to help soldiers and physicians to see all colors at night, and not only the green color of current night vision systems. These goggles, which should become available this summer, will be sold for about $6,000 to the Army. But as states one of the founders of the company, with monochrome night vision, 'blood is the same color as water.' So these expensive night vision devices might be more targeted to Army physicians than to regular soldiers."
Where are the pictures? Too much text and no pictures...
I'm tired of this idiot and the way he copies other articles so the silly slashdot editors can direct traffic at his half assed blog and help him make some money. He's even more annoying than the proprietary Micheal Simms.
Glass
but we knew that from reading who the submitter is
anyway here is the product page from Tenebraex
http://camouflage.com/colornightvision.php
Will adding color help with depth perception? It's one of the big issues with current night vision.
Developers: We can use your help.
...in helping advancing armies from getting too many tickets for running red lights.
If I was a soldier on recon or something, I'm pretty sure I'd like the ability to tell whether that liquid on the ground was water or blood.
There are some non-gun-toting people who need to operate in a stealthy or semi-stealthy manner that would make use of this sort of thing. Think of the National Geographic-types that are setting up a pre-dawn shoot and trying to remain less visible, or the guys working on a forward helicopter refueling station who definitely prefer to be harder to see and definitely want to know the difference between stepping in a puddle of water and a puddle of hydraulic fluid.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I thought these things were infra red based. That means that fresh blood should be body temperature/bright, while water should be area temperature/dark.
Sure, it might be the same 'green', but is should be dramatically different, one very dark green, the other a shiny bright green.
Am I misunderstanding something here? Or did they just use a bad example?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I'll pass, kthx.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
isn't it easier just to build a "real" artificial sun?
I had something that did this exact same thing!
I think it was called a flashlight.
In all seriousness though, this is a decent idea but has few practical purposes. Yes the article does mention that water and blood look the same under the scope so army physicians should have a pair, but it's the rods, not the cones of the eye that are much more sensitive to movement which is what the soldier needs to pinpoint a target.
The original generic sig.
I don't know if I misread the article but did they ever said how big these goggles are? Battlefield medics need good line of sight, and probably end up toting around enough stuff as it is. I'm not sure if this is going to sell well, especially if they're aiming it at the medics. Still its a cool bit of technology and I hope they're able to adopt it to something better like NERF Glow in the Dark Football/Basketball/Soccer!
How about some of these color nightvision goggles fitted with the bat ears that allow human echolocation?
Those kinds of sense boosters could make night, with less distractions away from the target, the most effective time to purse targets.
--
make install -not war
I have color blindness, but I can still see colors. Most color blind people can see colors, they simply have trouble distinguishing one color from the other, particularly when they are close... For instance, I have no trouble telling the difference between a red light and a green light, and I have no trouble distinguishing the colors on a weather map. But ask me to identify a particular color as pink or purple, and I can see the color as either or both at the same time. That's why I can't see the damn number on the test page! Most color blind people do not see in Monochrome, as it would seem that most of the non-color-blind world tends to believe. For more info, check out the wikipedia entry...
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
But are they both the same color as tears?
Small, small tears?
The non-gun-toting people are not as interesting. Besides, I do not condone the voyeurism of animals.
I wonder how this device works. There's no information about it at Tenebraex's website, so it doesn't say. I know that in basic biology you learn that eyes are made up of rods and cones. Rods distinguish light and dark and cones distinguish color. Cones don't work very well in the dark. Rods do. So we can't "see" color as well in the dark. It's interesting that this is both a biological and a technological problem.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Hopefully this can help Linus to see MS's tail lights. Those things are getting pretty distant. If it weren't for trying to catch up to Windows 95, MS would be past the horizon already.
There are three main technologies used for night vision in military equipment:
;)
1) Active IR: This is the old-style IR spotlight. This uses a just-below-visible IR spotlight and an IR-sensitive optical device (usually a driving periscope) Despite being IR-based, it is fairly narrowband and so isn't sensitive to heat - it is more like an "invisible spotlight". Not used much anymore.
2) Image Intensifiers (aka "Starlight"): This is the technology behind "night vision goggles" or NVGs for short. They magnify the available light. They are also slightly sensitive to near-IR, so you can see IR-based LEDs, stobes, glowsticks etc - wearing one, you can see the IR LED flash in a TV remote control. The older Gen 1 goggles used an element for each eye, so you had grainy binocular vision. Newer systems from Gen II to Gen IV give an increasingly sharper and clearer picture, but tend to be monocular, so no depth perception - and I've seen some pretty funny things happen because of it. These don't see heat either.
3) Thermal Imagers (aka TI): These are heat-sensitive, and can see through most smokes. These are much larger units, and are usually used as part of vehicle weapon system sights or dedicated surveillance equipment (NOD-IR) Most modern tanks have them, LAV-25s and Bradleys have them, and there are manpack versions to use in an OP - but you won't be bolting these to your helmet anytime soon.
Up close, these can see through clothing. Don't ask how I know this.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
These goggles, which should become available this summer, will be sold for about $6,000 to the Army.
And sold to consumers at Best Buy for $49.99 ($45.99 at Amazon).
You're right, medics don't need more weight, nor restrictively-large NVGs. But these things won't get any smaller unless someone buys the Gen-1 product, and a medic operating on a Blackhawk, working at a unit Casualty Collection Point, or even BN Aid Station (if light discipline is in effect) could gain a lot from having these available to him / her. By purchasing early revision models, the Army gets better casualty care near the front lines now, and hopefully even greater gains down the road.
Additionally, from the manufacturer description of how this system works, it sounds as if may be possible for it to be adapted to the PVS-21, allaying concerns about lack of depth perception (which, as noted above is an issue of binocular - not color - vision).
Sean R. Baker
CDT, United States Army
"Lead me, follow me,
or get out of my way."
take a wild guess why. plz mod down to oblivion.
I mean, come on folks, this technology has been around for decades: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thum b/1/14/High_power_torch.jpg/250px-High_power_torch .jpg
Slashdot is foregoing Roland's blog for the actual news source?
Looks like the army isn't the only one to be seeing less green.
Thanks, I'm here all night.
Is something burning?
Oh, it's my karma.
Prank site, more info here: http://www.sythe.org/archive/index.php/t-104214.ht ml
Okay, we all know the color spectrum. Isin't there a similar structure for the infrared spectrum?
What I mean is, just take CCD camera technology and instead of sensing RGB values, have it sense differnt wavelengths of IR light... then map them to RGB colors for the screen. Essencially, remapping the spectrum.
Right?
It always amazes me that in a society that feels the need to accommodate everyone, there are very few allowances for colorblind people. It doesn't really affect me that much, but it'd be nice if, for example, game developers would put a colorblind mode into videogames that would use an alternative to color-coding.
Cool to see a company working on the problem.
Once this technology drops to $500 or so, the major use will be for voyeurism. Porn drives the internet.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
"Bring me my red shirt!"
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
IANAH, (I am not a hillbilly), but these seem perfect for night jigglin'.
I've come to understand that seeing in only one/two color(s) (ie black and white, nightvision, etc) helps see movement a LOT easiar, which is why many predators have black and white vision. If I were a soldier on the field at night, I'd prefer to keep my nightvision on as a default, but I'm sure it would be useful for them to see in colors for a brief moment to determine what it is they are looking at (such as water and blood). But to always see in color at night might actually inhibit a soldier's ability.
This reminds me of a question my Grandfather posed to me when I was young (30+ yrs ago). When the lights are out, can you not see colors (objects) because it is dark or because they don't have any color w/o light shining on them, a bit like "does a tree falling make noise if no one is there to hear it". I haven't thought of this in a while, I am sure there is a scientific answer, I would guess the prior, the characteristics that make an object a certain color are still there when the lights are out.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Or maybe it was Sinbad.
You can't actually believe what you're saying, can you?
The US armed forces are the most highly equipped fighting forces in the history of the world. I mean, for chrissake, the crux of your argument is that the army is "cheap ass" because it only supplies monocular NIGHT VISION GOGGLES to its GIs. This is about as relevant as complaining that the Army is cheap because they only hand out Core-Solo notebooks to users instead of Core-Duo notebooks.
Do we have a perfect military? Of course not. But that's what you're complaining about. That they're not perfect. You're complaining because we gave troops body armor, just not enough. You're complaining that there WERE armored humvees and APCs but that not EVERY humvee was armored.
And your comment about medical care? Puh-leese. Our combat hospitals in Iraq have saved thousands and thousands of troops who, if this were Vietnam or even Desert Storm, would have been coming home in a bodybag. We're fighting a war where you can take shrapnel to the brain and LIVE TO TALK ABOUT IT ON NATIONAL TV. You can be in a fully equipped operating room having neurosurgery within 30 minutes of your injury. Brain Surgery. In a combat zone.
Yes, there are side effects to this. The Army has to treat FAR MORE injuries and the emotional stress associated with them. Since the civil war, these people were treated by the battlefield medic. Best case scenario the medic was able to stick them full of enough morphine to put them asleep so they could die in peace. Today, the medic has the equivalent of M*A*S*H in his back pack and within a half hour you're in a combat hospital on an operating table every bit as advanced as world class permanent facilities. Forty-eight hours later you're Stateside or in Europe beginning long term recovery.
So yes, that does mean some overcrowding issues. We're saving so many lives we don't know where to put them all. I don't mean to make light of the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed but go ads some soldiers. Say "Would you rather take shrapnel in Vietnam, stick yourself with your morphine, and if you're lucky, get a syringe of your buddies morphine so you can lay there and bleed out dreaming of the medivac, Or, would you rather take shrapnel in Iraq, be treated by a battlefield medic who will run an IV, treat your pain, and give you blood, as you wait for a medivac to take you to an operating table 20 minutes away before sewing you up and sending you off to lay in a moldy hotel room in surburban Washington DC for a day or two"
What would YOU choose? Obviously having them lay in paradise on craftmatic adjustable hammocks being fed grapes by gorgeous naked nymphomaniacs would be a great third choice, but this is reality. We have constraints to deal with.
That's just how it is. At the end of the day, there are constraints. Even for the military. Even with a half trillion dollar budget. Simply put, what you're asking for will cost more money. How do you propose we pay for it?
It strikes be that one of the first applications will be for pilots, especially helicopter pilots. Modern instrument displays are often multicolored and the need to distinguish colors has prevented pilots from using night vision systems in the past. I think that the fancy systems in Apaches deal with this somehow, but it would be very useful in other (cheaper) aircraft.
with monochrome night vision, 'blood is the same color as water.'
I find it hard to believe that a physician can't tell the difference between blood and water, even if only using monochrome.
Soldier: Hey, bob's been shot
Physician: No, no. That's clearly water
This isn't Candy Land, bro. We don't live in a world of peppermint and licorice and gumdrops.
I don't think that the war in Iraq was entirely necessary. But there are times when you DO need to go to war.
And when those times come, just like as it is now, things won't be perfect. Deal w/ it.
I'm a tetrachromat, you insensitive clod!
Ok, so how again does being against the war in Iraq have anything to do with chastising the Army for being "cheap asses?"
You should hold people accountable. And citizens should play a part in the political process. In 2003 I quit my comfy job writing shinkwrap software, packed up the car, and volunteered for Howard Dean for America. That's what _I_ did to stop the war in Iraq. Considering you turned this into some "stick your head in the sand" pissing match, tell me, what have YOU DONE to stop the war?
More on point, how does criticizing the Army, especially under-thought B.S. criticism, have anything to do with stopping the war in Iraq?
It's like you realized you couldn't possibly defend your moronic comments, so you just segued into a "Iraq War == Bad" argument. Give me a break...
Everything old is new again:
"The CBS field sequential color system in its simplest form consisted of a rotating color wheel of red, blue, and green filter segments in front of a monochrome camera, feeding a black and white CRT receiver viewed through a second rotating color wheel. The two wheels were kept in phase synchronization, such that successive television fields were viewed using identical color primary filters to that at the camera....
CBS had first broadcast its Field Sequential Color System as early as August 28, 1940."
http://novia.net/~ereitan/Color_Sys_CBS.html
No doubt this company got a patent for their revolutionary new night goggles? (Although I'll admit it is a useful steal of the concept.)
pray it doesn't rain if you're trying to treat a wounded soldier in the field in the middle of the evening