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Neuroscientists and materials scientists have developed new contact lenses that give people infrared vision, allowing them see in the dark, even with their eyes closed. Bonus: they don’t even require a power source.
Unlike infrared night vision goggles, the scientists explain, these new contact lenses “do not require a power source—and they enable the wearer to perceive multiple infrared wavelengths.”
“Because they’re transparent, users can see both infrared and visible light simultaneously, though infrared vision was enhanced when participants had their eyes closed,” they wrote in a statement.
“Our research opens up the potential for non-invasive wearable devices to give people super-vision,” said senior author Tian Xue, a neuroscientist at the University of Science and Technology of China. “There are many potential applications right away for this material. For example, flickering infrared light could be used to transmit information in security, rescue, encryption or anti-counterfeiting settings.”
How it works is the contact lenses use nanoparticles that absorb infrared light and convert it into wavelengths that are visible to mammalian eyes. The lenses are made up of these nanoparticles combined with the same flexible, non-toxic polymers that are used in standard soft contact lenses.
“It’s totally clear cut: without the contact lenses, the subject cannot see anything, but when they put them on, they can clearly see the flickering of the infrared light,” Xue said about the results of human tests. “We also found that when the subject closes their eyes, they’re even better able to receive this flickering information, because near-infrared light penetrates the eyelid more effectively than visible light, so there is less interference from visible light.”
An additional tweak to the contact lenses allows users to differentiate between different spectra of infrared light by engineering the nanoparticles to color-code different infrared wavelengths. For example, infrared wavelengths of 980 nm were converted to blue light, wavelengths of 808 nm were converted to green light, and wavelengths of 1,532 nm were converted to red light. In addition to enabling wearers to perceive more detail within the infrared spectrum, these color-coding nanoparticles could be modified to help color blind people see wavelengths that they would otherwise be unable to detect.
“By converting red visible light into something like green visible light, this technology could make the invisible visible for color blind people,” said Xue. He also added, “In the future, by working together with materials scientists and optical experts, we hope to make a contact lens with more precise spatial resolution and higher sensitivity.”
The full results of the study and the development of these new infrared vision contact lenses was recently published in the journal Cell.
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