The downsides they seem to ignore, include the literature showing light on the lower end Blue->UV, and light on the upper end to NIR, have direct impact on the endocrine system through light activated pathways in your eye. If you wear a contact lens, this light is blocked, the same goes for laser eye surgery where a artificial lens is used.
John Ott, and Fritz Hollwich pioneered early studies on photobiology, and funding for it has been sparse despite Asia's myopia crisis; which statistics show generally increased dramatically shortly after blue LEDs came to market in the late 90s, and appear correlated with exposure.
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.
it is as simple as preventing movement ye?
What would be some practical (or fun) uses of this?
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.
Instead of a standard bayer filter you have these applied as filters, letting you map NIR into the visible spectrum and then capturing it using standard silicon sensors.
Though I believe quantum nano dots are already used there.
The money will start pouring in if you can get this idea to work but with with thermal IR; those cameras are 2-3 decades behind visible light cameras because of the need for custom (non-silicon) sensors and tiny (by comparison) market.
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.
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.
Every search&rescue or police officer should have them although I suspect for firefighters it might not help.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if Mr money mustache can make a frugality case to wearing ir contact lenses instead of having lights on at night.
Instead of splashing people with UV paint and using black lights, just party in the dark.
As people age, one of the common complaints is the degradation of low light vision. This will help some.
At least some hunters I know have night vision goggles for going after wild hogs. They could just wear the contacts...
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.
Steps: wash hands, peel the pack, put contacts onto the eyes.
Although there are many different types of contact lenses (and fit types, and comfort) and many reasons for their use. For some, glasses just aren’t an option.
I remember walking around later after the sun had gone down, but my eyes were dilated. Around the outdoor lighting and porch lights, I could see everything. It was like I had superpowers and could see in the dark.
Seeing near-NIR without pointing a laser at your eye is interesting, but "cannot perceive"?
It's dim, yes. But there are perception reports well beyond 1000 nm (like 1.3 or 1.5 um). People see NIR ophthalmoscopes. I fuzzily recall a DIY attempt to wear a NIR bandpass filter, to make bright day into dark-adapted near-NIR night. And two-photon sensitivity[1] can level off the single-photon sensitivity log curve above 900 nm.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004269892...
or it can be made into display, you project IR image onto contact lenses, which converts that into visible light. if particle size is small enough.
im not sure about "efficiency" of such lens, we would need more watts to display something on this lens than we would need to project direct to eye. so im not sure if that difference is big enough to not be suitable for wearables or not.
It works like those glow-in-the-dark stickers that you charge up under a light, then take into a dark room to glow.
Except the IR card would not glow until hit by infrared, like from your TV remote. Then it would light up red as the "charged up" energy would kick infrared up into the visible spectrum. (or probably vice versa)
