Superhuman vision is here—in a contact lens
The standard spectrum of visible light not quite doing it for you? Tired of bulky night vision goggles being necessary for sneaking around in the dark?
Neurotech developers have a solution you’re going to love.
All jokes aside, there are many reasons expanding human vision to superhuman levels could be useful—from correcting for color-blindness to exploring the universe’s darkest spaces. And innovators are making it as simple as wearing contact lenses.
The story: Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China have developed contact lenses that allow humans to see infrared light.
- Infrared is a band of the electromagnetic spectrum that is invisible to the naked human eye. Normally, people need to use technology like infrared vision night goggles to perceive these wavelengths of light.
- With the infrared contact lenses, wearers don’t need an external power source and don’t have to switch between devices to continue seeing the visible spectrum at the same time.
Overcoming human vision limitations: If you’ve never thought about it, you might not realize that standard human vision consists of less than one hundredth of a percent of existing light wavelengths. Yes, that’s even true if you have so-called “perfect” 20/20 vision.
- Humans can see the wavelengths from 400 to 700 nanometers.
- However, other mammals, like reindeer and mice, can see the shorter wavelengths of ultraviolet (UV) light, and other animals, like snakes, can detect far-infrared wavelengths—or thermal radiation.
- Currently, the only way for humans to surpass their color vision limitations is to wear cumbersome night vision goggles or other such devices, which have been around for almost a century, originally developed by Germany in World War II.
- Yet, these devices require an external power structure and are built with multiple layers that make them opaque, thus making it impossible to use them and see the standard visible spectrum at the same time.
Superhuman vision: To make their dream of infrared-sensing contact lenses a reality, the scientists had to study different biocompatible polymetric materials and nanoparticles they’d previously studied for their ability to enable infrared sight.
- In their previous research, the scientists had injected these nanoparticles into the eyes of mice. Upon binding with each mouse’s photoreceptors, these nanoparticles gave the mouse near-infrared vision.
- If you’re squirming at the thought of injecting something into your eyes, don’t worry, that’s exactly why the researchers decided to go for contact lenses with their next project.
- Humans wearing the eventual lenses detected flashing signals in infrared light.
- Interestingly enough, both humans and mice were able to better distinguish the infrared signals when subjects had their eyes closed, suggesting infrared can penetrate the eyelid more effectively than visible wavelengths.
While the contact lenses won’t be available as a commercial product anytime soon, these findings do open up new pathways to more subtle sensory enhancements. Along with the augmented reality (AR) and exoskeleton trends we’ve covered, we see this avenue of innovation as an exciting signal of the way we’ll be building tech-enabled superhuman ability sooner than we think.