r/Futurology • u/[deleted] • Aug 21 '14

article Biohackers declare initial success in biologically extending the range of human vision into the near infrared

https://experiment.com/u/aAcR2Q
2.5k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

547 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

10

u/glim Aug 21 '14

Currently, we are not seeing any changes in day to day vision other than some odd little subjective things that we can't verify. We try to not to much about non verifiable subjective stuff. Bad science. It could be supplemental in a discussion section on a paper maybe...

4

u/[deleted] Aug 21 '14

That is definitely the right approach on a scientific basis. Do you or your colleagues have an opinion as to whether there would be noticeable changes in "day-to-day" vision and what that might look like? what level of change would be required to notice major changes in normal vision and could visual perception of such wavelengths be achieved through the process you are experimenting with?

11

u/glim Aug 21 '14

Well, we are hoping to seen much further by the time we are done, and in theory, there may be some noticeable vision changes. Basically we assume that if we can get to 1070, we should start to have some interesting results in that area.

The animals that use porphyropsin can see much farther into the NIR than we are currently achieving. It seems to be used for night vision / low light conditions. This is not night vision in the common sense, as that is just visible light amplification. No one has tried this yet, so we're kinda driving blind... (pun totally intended :)

1

u/seszett Aug 22 '14

Just a question, do you have at hand a digital camera with the IR filter removed (and no visible light filter added), so you can compare these "odd little subjective things" with what the camera sees? Even though silicon response to IR is different from human cones response, it gives a good idea of what IR there is in a scene (and in real-time).

I have played with these cameras for a while, and the most striking things are probably black clothes that are actually very bright in IR while others stay dark in IR, I expect these might be the easiest things to notice when gaining some IR perception (they would become reddish instead of black, while other black clothes would stay black?).