From evening drives to navigating a house or a park in the dark, there are so many situations where it'd be handy to slip on a simple pair of night-vision lenses and the world that's beyond human optical perception could be illuminated like never before. This vision could be a reality, with a…
  • Flipper@feddit.deEnglish
    45·
    6 months ago

    This isn’t really night vision in the typical sense. It’s an Infrared camera in a thin package.

    Also Military night vision is described wrong. The photon doubled is quite small. The problem is that afterwards the image needs to be turned again. That is done with fiberoptics. Those take the amount of space.

    • magiccupcake@lemmy.worldEnglish
      28·
      6 months ago

      “This is the first demonstration of high resolution up-conversion imaging from 1550-nm infrared to visible 550-nm light in a non-local metasurface," said author Rocio Camacho Morales. "We choose these wavelengths because 1,550 nm, an infrared light, is commonly used for telecommunications, and 550 nm is visible light to which human eyes are highly sensitive. Future research will include expanding the range of wavelengths the device is sensitive to, aiming to obtain broadband IR imaging, as well as exploring image processing, including edge detection.”

      That does not sound like an Infrared camera.

      • Bad_Engineering@fedia.io
        7·
        6 months ago

        You’re right, there is no capture or recording of light in this system. Electromagnetic metasurfaces directly alter the waveform of photons as they pass through. In this instance it directly converts infrared light into visible 550nm (green) light.

    • notabot@lemm.eeEnglish
      6·
      6 months ago

      The device captures visible and infrared light, just like a typical night vision scope. They’re working on expanding the spectrum too, which could lead to some interesting and useful results. I understand that, for instance, skin cancers are more visible under certain UV wavelengths, so imagine a doctor being able to just put on a pair of glasses that convert that wavelength to give you a once over during a checkup.