Contact Lenses With Infrared Vision?

Orlando (12257) writes "A story on Singularity Hub reports that "Researchers at the University of Michigan, led by electrical engineer Zhaohui Zhong, have devised a way to capture the infrared spectrum without requiring the cooling that makes infrared goggles so cumbersome." The method uses graphene and could one day lead to ultra light weight infrared vision technology."

Comments

Not practical as contact lenses

[rebelwarlock]

Infrared essentially blocks out normal vision. While this may be useful as wearable computing, it wouldn't be useful if you had to poke around in your eye every time you needed to switch back to normal vision.

Re:Not practical as contact lenses

[Scutter]

Exactly. I'm not sure why it needs to jump directly to contacts. Why not just regular sunglasses? The article even says "...that makes infrared goggles so cumbersome." So, great! Now you can pack all of that down into a standard pair of glasses that you can easily put on and take off, even when your fingers are filthy from crawling in the dirt during combat.

Re:Not practical as contact lenses

[RNLockwood]

When I go out to the desert on a clear day I'm getting a lot of infrared, if it blocked out normal vision I wouldn't need sunglasses (except that the glasses block UV). Perhaps what was meant is that the lens that would be needed to focus the light would block the IR and the lens for IR would block visible light. That's generally true except for near IR (NIR) but to separate NIR from visible IR a filter to do that would be used just as it is used in digital cameras.

The article implies that it works across the IR spectrum but that's enormously wide - from about 700 nm to 1 mm wavelength with ever decreasing energy in the photons.

I think that there is less information in the press release than meets the eye.

Re:Not practical as contact lenses

[ArcadeMan]

For videogames, what you need is X-ray vision. The ability to see the electric signals in the LCD gril before they hit the actual pixels will give you an advantage of several milliseconds compared to your opponents. The same principle applies to Monster cables' gold-plated, titanium-coated, oxygen-free optical cables which give you pure digital audio, free of data which are not zeros or ones.

Re:Not practical as contact lenses

[Guppy06]

I can see a business model where you'd sell these glasses from the backs of comic books.

Re:Not practical as contact lenses

[rtaylor]

Close your IR eye and open your normal vision eye.

Same idea as pirates moving their patch from one eye to the other when going from surface to inside the dark ship.

What will it look like?

[kruach aum]

Will it be like seeing a whole new colour, or will the infrared spectrum still need to be translated into the already visible spectrum? Judging by the article it seems to be the second, but the first would be much cooler.

Re:What will it look like?

[kruach aum]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...

relevant part: "Humans cannot perceive UV light directly since the lens of the eye blocks most light in the wavelength range of 300-400 nm; shorter wavelengths are blocked by the cornea.[18] Nevertheless, the photoreceptors of the retina are sensitive to near UV light and people lacking a lens (a condition known as aphakia) perceive near UV light as whitish blue or whitish-violet, probably because all three types of cones are roughly equally sensitive to UV light, but blue cones a bit more.[19]"

A new colour, and all you have to do to be able to see it is have no lens.

Re:What will it look like?

[mark-t]

The limiting factor to seeing more colors is not in the brain. it is in the eyes themseves. It's my understanding that some frequencies get blocked out by the lens, but the far greater limitation is in the cones within the eye. The 3 major types of cones in human eyes (some people have more, but let's stick to the norm here) each respond to specific frequencies of photons, which create electrical signals that your brain interprets as color. If you changed the type of cones you had in your eyes, you would change the electrical signals received by the brain and could very easily end up seeing entirely new colors that you have never seen before. Particularly if the signals sent by the new types of cones were different than the regular ones. There's no reason at all to suspect that the brain would process different types of input in terms of what it already knows how to process beyond our own inability to imagine what it would actually be like.

People with 4 types of cones in their eyes can already quite easily perceive the differences in many hues and shades that are completely indistinguishable for an average individual who has otherwise even perfect visual clarity. Expanding the types of cones in the eyes to include UV or IR should, by all rights (amounts blocked by the lens itself notwithstanding), enable being able to see many entirely new colors as well.

Re:Cool?

[kruach aum]

I think being able to see a new color would be a reasonable trade-off for the risks of neurosurgery.

You don't want to see IR

[barlevg]

For practical purposes (like night vision), sure, definitely useful. But for everyday "recreational" use, you really don't want to see people's blood vessels, etc. Given the choice, I'd much rather see UV.

Re:You don't want to see IR

[barlevg]

YMMV, but for me I think this would fall in the same category as hotel room black lights or reviewing your restaurant's last health inspection: for the most part, it's just better not to know.

Utterly misleading post.

[queazocotal]

A) Thermal imagers have not required cooling since approximately 1980.
(for other than extremely specialised applications.

B) Having a sensor does not magically mean it can be used in a contact lens.

You need electronics, LEDs, and focussing optics in order to get it into the eye in a coherent image.

Re:Utterly misleading post.

[BitZtream]

The eye IS the focusing optics, you don't need a whole bunch of extra stuff, you just need to shift IR a few mm into visible and let the eye and brain do what they do.

All slashdot summaries are misleading at this stage, why do you think Taco left?

Re:Cool?

[bobbied]

So, we just blink and the TV channel will change?

No, but you will be blinded when using the remote control..

IR mods for early digital cameras ...

[davidwr]

... used to be easy to do. Then the companies got wind that people were using them to "see through clothing" and made it impractical for most hobbyists.

Google Glass is one thing but as soon as people clamor OMG to the press and politicians loud enough, commercial companies will be afraid to market this to consumers and legislators may step in to criminalize the un-disclosed use of "IR vision" for non-"legitimate" (e.g. security cameras) use or even criminalize all non-"legitimate" IR use in public places.

Come to think if it, I might be in favor of rules allowing for civil-court action for failing to disclosure of "see through clothing-capable" photography done in places accessible to the public.

Re:IR mods for early digital cameras ...

[ceoyoyo]

Take off the tinfoil hat. Sony once sold a camcorder with an IR mode that there was some brief controversy about, but that's about it. Lots of hobbyists modify cameras to see IR. Lots of cheaper cameras have crappy filters and pick up quite a bit without modification. Canon specifically sells (or sold, it's quite old now) a version of one of their SLRs without an IR filter. You can buy one for $25 to hook up to your Raspberry Pi.

Oh, BS.

[jeffb (2.718)]

Yet another press release that glosses over the difference between "sensor" and "imaging system".

Give me the best, most sensitive, highest-resolution, lowest-power, and cheapest thermal IR sensor array you can imagine, and it's just a glorified ambient thermometer unless you can focus onto it. I'm sure there are cyberpunks/steampunks/whatever who would be happy to rock germanium-lensed spectacles, and I'm sure there are body-modders who would love to have pit organs in their foreheads, but you're NOT getting a self-contained thermal-imaging contact lens.

Oh, okay, I can imagine something that would work like an insect's compound eye, with an array of highly directional individual sensors -- but that's not what TFA is talking about, and it's not something we're likely to see in the next couple of decades.

Why?

[Arkh89]

There is just one link to put in TFA : http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2014.31.html. Note that this paper never mentioned the word "contact lenses".
So why? Why do we have instead a link to some stupid news site where they clearly don't have any clue on what they are talking about?

Also impossible

[Chalnoth]

The article describes a technique for sensing infrared light, turning it into an electric current. It's not possible to do that and display an image on a contact lens that we could actually focus on (you can't focus on something that's right on your eye).

The only way to make a contact lens that would allow somebody to see infrared light would be to have a lens made out of a material such that when it receives an infrared photon, it absorbs that photon and emits a visible-light photon traveling in the same direction. That's very much not going to be possible with a technology built for sensing in this manner. The use of this tech would basically be lighter-weight infrared goggles and other sensors.