Contact lenses with night vision could be on the way thanks to graphene breakthrough

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Contact lenses with night vision could be on the way thanks to graphene breakthrough

 

night-vision-contacts.jpg

Lenses made from the atom-thick 'wonder material' could be used in phones or even contact lenses to make night vision available for all

 

Night vision technology has been around for a while, but it's only really used by professionals (or professional creeps) due to its prohibitive size.

But what if night vision was something you could fit into a pair of contact lenses? You could keep a pair in your bag to slip in if you were going to be walking home alone in the dark, or even use them to take a night-time jaunt through a forest without spooking all the animals.

All this and more could be possible in the future thanks to a new development by researchers in the US using graphene lenses to sense ?the full infrared spectrum? plus visible and ultraviolet light.

"We can make the entire design super-thin," said Zhaohui  Zhong, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan. "It can be stacked on a contact lens or integrated with a cell phone."

Current night vision technology needs bulky cooling equipment to stop the detectors getting confused by their own heat radiation, but the graphene-based models can do the same job using just a few layers of the atom-thick material.

 

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