Over the last few months, especially since the announcement of the innovative Apple Vision Pro, different types of smart glasses have not stopped coming to the market such as the Xiaomi MIJIA Smart Audio Glasses, glasses that hide Bluetooth headphones and cost less than $60 at the exchange rate or the Solos AirGo Vision, a device that integrates Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT-4o into traditional glasses.
But, while manufacturers study how to launch new products with intelligent functions on the market, there are studies that try to find out how to enhance the capabilities of conventional glasses and a good proof of this is that a group of researchers has managed to create a technology capable of turning your glasses into night vision glasses.
Australian researchers create an infrared filter that lets you see in the dark
Researchers from TMOS, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Metaoptical Systems in Australia, Laura Valencia Molina, Rocio Camacho Morales, Jihua Zhang, Roland Schiek, Isabelle Staude, Andrey A. Sukhorukov and Dragomir N. Neshev have recently published a study in the journal Advanced Materials in which they explain that they have managed to manufacture an infrared filter that converts conventional glasses into night vision goggles.
As detailed in the aforementioned publication, this revolutionary filter has been manufactured using an upconversion technology based on metasurfaces, an ultra-thin material that can capture infrared light and visible light at the same time. This allows this filter to be thinner than a piece of cling film and weigh less than a gram, something that would allow it to be placed in ordinary glasses without them hardly increasing their weight.
This infrared filter is equipped with a metasurface-based upconversion technology whereby photons pass through a single resonant metasurface where they are mixed with a pumping beam.
In addition, this resonant metasurface improves the energy of the photons, converting them into a spectrum of visible light without the need for electron conversion, and also operates at room temperature, thus dispensing with the bulky and heavy cooling systems of classic night vision goggles.
Obviously, this technology will still take a few years to reach the first devices, but, once it does, it will be possible to have “normal” glasses with which you will be able to see both day and night.
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