Near-infrared spatiotemporal color vision enabled by upconversion contact lenses
25 comments
·May 22, 2025interestica
blacksmith_tb
Sounds fun, but various kinds of jeweler's loupes and magnifying glasses seem less invasive then needing to stick the lenses directly in your eyes? I wore contacts in my 20s, but don't miss all the mess these days.
ArnoVW
Synopsis: Humans cannot perceive infrared light due to the physical thermodynamic properties of photon-detecting opsins. However, the capability to detect invisible multispectral infrared light with the naked eye is highly desirable. Here, we report wearable near-infrared (NIR) upconversion contact lenses (UCLs) with suitable optical properties, hydrophilicity, flexibility, and biocompatibility. Mice with UCLs could recognize NIR temporal and spatial information and make behavioral decisions. Furthermore, human participants wearing UCLs could discriminate NIR information, including temporal coding and spatial images. Notably, we have developed trichromatic UCLs (tUCLs), allowing humans to distinguish multiple spectra of NIR light, which can function as three primary colors, thereby achieving human NIR spatiotemporal color vision. Our research opens up the potential of wearable polymeric materials for non-invasive NIR vision, assisting humans in perceiving and transmitting temporal, spatial, and color dimensions of NIR light.
wing-_-nuts
Yeah boss, I'm gonna need an ELI5 and potential use cases here
bobsmooth
Contact lens converts IR to visible light. Use cases include night vision and seeing if your tv remote is working.
Mindless2112
> However, detecting environmental NIR information in the natural conditions at night without NIR illumination still remains challenging, requiring further advancements in material science and optical design.
Sadly no night vision contact lenses yet.
potato3732842
Identifying things that aren't the right temperature a trillions of dollars problem spread across many industries.
Though I think perhaps glasses are a better form factor for such tech.
bediger4000
> Mice with UCLs
Holy moly, putting contacts on mice?!?! It's just this side of impossible to put contacts on another human, and not much easier putting them on yourself.
That's dedication to science.
unsupp0rted
> However, the capability to detect invisible multispectral infrared light with the naked eye is highly desirable.
What would be some practical (or fun) uses of this?
kridsdale1
Military use.
drewbeck
I love this line. The confidence! As if humans have of course wanted IR visibility for ever.
kridsdale1
In the past, when armies faced each other on a front, activity halted at night.
You gain a huge advantage if you can infiltrate to sabotage or assassinate the enemy camp in a way that you can see them but they can’t see you.
See the Japanese foxhole assaults on various island fronts.
cryptonector
IIUC the contact lenses in TFA don't upconvert sufficiently long wavelength IR, so it's not going to be unaided night vision just quite yet.
potato3732842
Imagine being able to detect every situation where heat is a potential indicator of either problems or a system working as intended by simply looking at it.
It would be a wildly valuable tool to any industry that does things. Currently such work is mostly done on a spot basis with IR temp guns and cameras.
Imagine being able to see a failing conveyor bearing from across a facility or a low pressure tire as it rolls by.
hollerith
But the OP is about near-infrared (NIR) light. Sensitive instruments for detecting NIR can only detect objects hotter than 440 deg F (according to an LLM I just consulted) and even then longer wavelengths are the preferred wavelengths for detection: NIR doesn't start becoming the preferred wavelength till the object gets up to at least 800 deg F.
The sun emits tons of NIR, so if this tech has a practical application, I'm guessing it is in detecting objects outdoors during the daytime that look distinctive in NIR and do not look distinctive in visible light, e.g., maybe military hardware covered by fabric or camouflage netting.
potato3732842
>NIR doesn't start becoming the preferred wavelength till the object gets up to at least 800 deg F.
My understanding is that due to the relative bell curve of emitted wavelengths a hot object should still look "funny" in the same way that a cherry red piece of iron still looks like iron, just different. Is that not true for NIR?
dvh
If we pass infrared through nonlinear material, will it produce distortion, which in turn will create higher harmonics which will be in the visible spectrum?
amacbride
Infravision! (For you D&D nerds out there.)
RicoElectrico
As I expected, it needs additional optics to be useful. Consider a sheet of fluorescent film you put on your eyeball. If there's an omnidirectional point source of light, it would excite the whole film virtually uniformly. Hence the upconversion contact lens needs to lie on some sort of a focal plane to be useful.
fellowniusmonk
so would wearing these contacts paired with glasses to serve as a focal plain work?
metalman
resolution is too low for any practical use case another article pointed out that it makes no difference if you have your eyes closed, as these things work behind your eyelids this is long way from bieng able to help you tell if your date is interested or what
I got fitted for contact lenses. The “fitting” pair were used to measure and adjust. They didn’t have an actual prescription. However, they gave me super-human magnified vision for anything closer than a foot to my face. It was clearer than anything that could be achieved with lenses/magnification outside the eye. It was like having microscopes for eyes.
I seriously just wanted to get a pair for fine vision tasks like soldering. It made me wonder what type of other “vision augmentation” things might be doable with existing tech. There’s probably a market for devices like this even for those with normal/perfect vision.