Ehhh… I dunno, man. It’s a great first step and an awesome demonstration of metasurfaces, but NewAtlas is heavily editorializing the outcome, to the point of making the paper’s authors look foolish (if you didn’t know that the authors aren’t making the outlandish claims)
Among NA’s claims: night vision without cooling, and comparison to MCP-based image intensifiers.
The authors successfully upconverted ~1500nm photons to 550nm with high efficiency.
So, not really night vision in the sense of thermal IR (yet) That’s why they don’t need cooling: it isn’t thermal IR, which is more like 9000nm.
But it’s also not the same class of image intensification like in a typical “night vision” goggle/scope:
You get some intensification by up converting IR to vis with high efficiency, while simultaneously passing vis (and the neat effect of combining both in one image without additional processing). You could get like 1-2x intensification from the wider spectrum (using a wider band version of the apparatus—the current one is fairly monochromatic), not 100x by amplifying photon counts.
Newatlas also fails to mention another interesting property: the amplified wavelength is tunable!
I'm tired of science reporting overselling technology. They are starting with the idealized outcome: "this film lets you turn glasses into night vision!" When the reality is far from that. New technologies in development should be framed in terms of the goals and applications, but then establish more grounded facts of where the state of the art is, the proof of concept that exists, and the state that the technology is currently in.
Who cares about night vision. Unless I missed a whole lot of development in physics, the ability to passively shift frequencies from outside to inside of visible range is the cool thing. I'd like to wear this material during the day, possibly with a visible light attenuator in front. The world may look different in beautiful or practically important ways when viewed at wavelengths outside our visual range, and we won't know how much until we start actually seeing them as we move about.
Exactly; the article more or less obfuscates what the present proof of concept looks like. After opening with this dream of what sounds like an entirely passive system you could just select as a coating on your next Zenni Optical order, It makes no mention of current power requirements or how much space everything else takes up.
Would it fit in a Vision Pro? Is it currently 75 pounds of equipment spread over a test bench? The article is useless on these questions.
It's a selection/survivor bias going on too. The public doesn't want to read about some incremental gain in some subfield they have no expertise in. People interested in those are reading the journals and preprints and mailing lists and such.
Unfortunately, that means what typically makes it to widely shared mainstream science news is the clickbait sensationalist marketing hype. Sober analysis isn't good for TikTok...
So if it is not in the thermal IR range, I suppose it is not particularly useful in seeing humans and other warm-blooded animals in the dark? As far as I know, there is not much ambient IR at night time.
What I would find most useful when driving at night is glasses that attenuate intense light rays, so that the increasingly-powerful oncoming headlights will not be blinding. I have a vague impression that channel-plate image intensifiers have this property, on account of individual channels saturating in their ability to release electrons.
That's what I was thinking as it was going on about driving. True "night vision" is going to have an even harder time with modern headlights coming at me than my eyes do.
Among NA’s claims: night vision without cooling, and comparison to MCP-based image intensifiers.
The authors successfully upconverted ~1500nm photons to 550nm with high efficiency.
So, not really night vision in the sense of thermal IR (yet) That’s why they don’t need cooling: it isn’t thermal IR, which is more like 9000nm.
But it’s also not the same class of image intensification like in a typical “night vision” goggle/scope:
You get some intensification by up converting IR to vis with high efficiency, while simultaneously passing vis (and the neat effect of combining both in one image without additional processing). You could get like 1-2x intensification from the wider spectrum (using a wider band version of the apparatus—the current one is fairly monochromatic), not 100x by amplifying photon counts.
Newatlas also fails to mention another interesting property: the amplified wavelength is tunable!