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."

Comments

press release disguised as news

[Anonymous Coward]

but we knew that from reading who the submitter is

anyway here is the product page from Tenebraex
http://camouflage.com/colornightvision.php

Re:Depth perception

[AKAImBatman]

I doubt it. It will help some if the colors are vibrant enough for the human eye to read more "cues" than were available with green-vision, but otherwise it still comes back to the matter of binocular vision. You need two sensors set apart from one another at the approximate distance of your eyes in order to replicate that ability. Otherwise, it's like strapping a television screen to your face and a camera to your head, and walking down the street. You can do it, but it's disorienting.

For the record...

[coolmoose25]

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...

Re:"Blood the same color as water????"

[AKAImBatman]

I thought these things were infra red based.

Nope. Green-vision systems work on light-amplification principles. Infrared is a different technology that's more useful in tracking than it is as generic night-vision.

So what is it doing, exactly?

[The-Bus]

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.

Different Technologies

[DG]

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

Re:Depth perception

[MindStalker]

The real problem is one of magnification. Most night googles provide some amount of magnification (ie zoom) providing depth perception and zoom requires heavy math on the part of the googles to separate the images just the right amount to provide a sense of depth that would be faulty if you simply zoomed. Its possible but computationally heavy.

Re:Depth perception

[gravesb]

No, the PVS-14 only covers one eye.

Re:Depth perception

[theshowmecanuck]

If you notice, many night vision goggles have one lens for capturing the 'input' (actually the intensifier) which is split and fed to the two lenses for your eyes. So, yes, in many cases they are getting the same image for both eyes. i.e. it is not true binocular vision.

Re:Fuck Roland Piquepaille

[siglercm]

Oblig: Please tag as 'ohnoitsroland' -- thank you.

Ronald Piquepaille has mended his ways. The story links straight to the relevant article and not to his blog. Are you sure? I haven't been checking the Firehose lately. When I did last week, Roland was submitting articles with self-referring blog links.

You see, it's the Slashdot editors we should be thanking, not Roland in the least. They have (at least twice recently) redacted his go-back-to-my-blog-and-run-up-my-hits self linkage. Thank you, editors!