Scientists in China have developed contact lenses that allow carriers to see light normally invisible to human eye. Even cooler, lenses work better through closed eyelids, and other versions could help correct color blindness.
The human eye can see a relatively limited range of colors – light with wavelengths between around 400 and 700 nanometers. Typically centered on man, we call this “visible” part of the spectrum, even if others Animals can see beyond he.
In a new study, scientists helped humans see a light between 800 and 1,600 nanometers, a range that we cannot normally see known as infrared. The trick is to appear in a pair of contact lenses integrated with nanoparticles that convert the infrared wavelengths to visible.
The specialty objectives do not disturb the ability of a carrier to see visible light, they simply add infrared sources to the mixture. In the tests, the carriers could identify the indicator signals of the infrared LEDs and say what direction the light came.
“It’s totally clear: without contact lenses, the subject can not see anything, but when they put them, they can clearly see the flicker of infrared light”, ” said Tian XueNeuroscientist at the University of Science and Technology in China.
The most intriguing conclusion is perhaps that the carriers could still see the infrared light with the closed eyes – in fact, their special lenses seemed to work better than the open. Indeed, infrared light penetrates more deep into the skin than visible light, so that the eyelids essentially filter more intense dazzling.
To be clear, the carriers are not See “New” colors – This requires a larger scientific configuration. In this case, nanoparticles absorb infrared light and convert it into familiar and visible colors. This could help us recover new information about our environment, with possible security or encryption Applications, said the team.
Going a little further, the researchers have shown that a more detailed version of the contact lenses could allow users to identify various parts of the infrared spectrum. The nanoparticles color infrared wave wavelengths, so the light at 808 nanometers seemed green, 980 nanometers were blue and 1,532 nanometers had red air.
Extending to this observation, the team says that it could possibly be adapted to help Dynamic people See the things they can’t normally. Again, that would not reveal the missing colors but would convert these wavelengths into the eye of the person that the eye can detect.
The disadvantage of contact lenses is that they are so close to the retina that the converted light is dispersed, making things a little blurred. Portable glasses based on the same nanoparticles have enabled a perception of high -resolution infrared light.
In the follow -up tests with these glasses, the team could even show how infrared light reflecting on objects could code different information invisible to the naked eye. Objects appear to us as certain colors because of the specific patterns of visible light which bounce them in our retinas. The same thing happens with infrared light, but we cannot (normally) see it.
In the tests, the letters that seemed boring in black or white to the participants who do not carry the glasses took vibrant colors when they put fantasy specifications. Indeed, the infrared wavelengths that bounced them were converted into specific visible wavelengths by glasses.
The idea of walking by picking up heat signatures in the darkness is fun, but do not expect to benefit from predator-vision so early. Nanoparticles can only provide infrared light from solid LED sources for the moment, but the team hopes that sensitivity can be increased in future work.
Research was published in the journal Cell.