Get the Popular Science daily newsletterđź’ˇ
Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week.
A team of engineers created new, Blade Runner-esque eyewear that gives wearers a glimpse into the hidden world of infrared light.Â
Though it’s literally all around us, humans can’t naturally perceive infrared. Each tiny infrared photon does not have enough energy to trigger the light-sensing cells in our retinas. To work around this biological limit, a team from the Beijing Institute of Technology built a system that captures infrared light and converts it into electrical charges. The charges are then funneled into an OLED- layer (like those used in some laptops and monitors) built directly into the glasses’ transparent lens. Once converted, the process turns infrared into light human eyes can actually see.Â
Previous conversion efforts represented all infrared light as a single color. These glasses can pinpoint different infrared wavelengths and represent them as varying hues of red and cyan (yellow), all while still letting natural visible light pass through. The end result is a pair of glasses that let the user simultaneously see infrared wavelengths next to ordinary visible light through one lens.
The researchers aren’t subtle about the perceived impact of the device. They refer to this new ability to see infrared vision as a “paradigm shift,” and a step towards surpassing our evolutionary biology. What that actually means for everyday people in more practical applications, however, is still less clear.Â
“By surpassing the evolutionary boundaries of biological photoreception, this technology paves the way for next-generation visual prosthetics, high-fidelity augmented reality, molecularly sensitive substance identification, and robust navigation in degraded visual environments,” the team writes in the paper.Â
Their findings were published last week in the journal Science Advances.Â
When it comes to light perception, humans are pretty limited compared to many other animals. Rattlesnakes, vampire bats, and certain beetles and all perceive infrared waves. Bees and birds likewise have the ability to perceive ultraviolet light. Humans can’t do either. In fact, our eyes are limited to wavelengths somewhere between 400 to 700 nanometers, which means we can only see somewhere less than one hundredth of a percent of the total electromagnetic spectrum. As a result, the researchers say that humans are “inherently blind to infrared radiation.”Â
But what humans may lack in eyesight, they can make up for in ingenuity. To convert infrared, the team used tiny engineered particles called mercury telluride colloidal quantum dots. These particles are capable of absorbing infrared photons. That absorbed light was then funneled into a light-emitting OLED layer with two separate color channels: a red layer that lights up first, and a cyan layer that only gets triggered once the red layer is overwhelmed by a stronger or shorter-wavelength signal. Weaker, longer-wave infrared light results in a red image, while stronger, shorter-wavelength infrared light produces a red-cyan mixture.
That conversion system was then fitted into a pair of lightweight, 23-gram (about half an ounce) eyeglasses. In testing, researchers shone infrared light onto various shapes and moving objects. The glasses then rendered that infrared in shades of red or a red-cyan mixture, overlaid on top of a normal field of visible light.Â
The glasses achieved their scientific goal, but they likely won’t be seen on any runways anytime soon. Their flimsy frame is made of a strip of beige plastic, with the display covering only one eye. The final product looks something like a cross between a low-budget Cyberpunk eyepiece and the disposable 3D glasses used in early-2000s movie theaters.
These aren’t the only infrared vision devices currently in the works. Another research team out of the University of Science and Technology of China recently designed a prototype contact lens that can similarly detect infrared wavelengths and present them as color. Though both this and the infrared glasses are still very much in the lab and testing phase, researchers from both teams see their work as a stepping stone to one day give wearers a kind of “super vision.”Â
And while it might not sound as impressive as comic-book-style X-ray vision, it would at least give humans a leg up in the infrared department compared to bugs and birds.
2026 Popular Science Home of the Future Awards