Researchers in China have developed contact lenses that overcome the limitations of human vision to open a “brand-new window onto the world”.
Infrared light is invisible to the human eye. A form of electromagnetic radiation, its wavelengths fall outside the eye’s visible range of 400-700 nanometres.
If humans want to see beyond this vision range – for instance, to be able to see in the dark – they use night-vision goggles or similar technology that can ‘see’ infrared wavelengths longer than 700 nanometres.
However, this may no longer need to be the case following a study by researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, China.
The team infused contact lenses with nanoparticles that convert near-infrared light in the 800–1,600 nanometre range into the 400–700 nanometre range.
The new lenses offer multi-coloured infrared images that night-vision goggles, which operate on a monochrome green scale, typically do not. They also pick up intense infrared signals...