Author Topic: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?  (Read 4983 times)

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Offline JennyTopic starter

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Just a relax talk ;D
Assuming the FOV and resolution remain the same as your normal eyes.
Also, will you choose MWIR or LWIR?
 

Offline Jeroen3

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #1 on: September 23, 2020, 01:59:38 pm »
My monitor would look very boring.
 
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Offline indeterminatus

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #2 on: September 23, 2020, 02:02:37 pm »
If that would be a permanent option to pick, no. If I could hop between different ranges, yes.
 
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Offline Vipitis

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #3 on: September 23, 2020, 02:22:39 pm »
while the biology behind this is interesting, there is a good reason why nothing on this planet as "thermal eyes" and it is water.

You lose a lot of fidelity by going monochrome and darkness wouldn't exist. I am sure our ancestors would do this or people that lost their eyesight(replace by low res thermal). But it is more utilitarian for active predators than humans using stuff like printed books, phone screens etc.

lovely paper on the a simulation to how some snakes "see" thermal: https://jeb.biologists.org/content/jexbio/210/16/2801.full.pdf
 
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Online Bud

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #4 on: September 23, 2020, 03:56:11 pm »
Speaking of biology, i do not want to see people farting.
Facebook-free life and Rigol-free shack.
 
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Offline calel

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #5 on: September 23, 2020, 03:58:23 pm »
you mean only thermal (no more visible light)? you kidding


though on the plus side every woman would look hot
 
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Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #6 on: September 23, 2020, 05:42:03 pm »
I would love to add spectrum, but would never switch full on to IR.  All signage, art, clothing and other aesthetic material is designed for our existing spectrum.

Your question throws physical reality out the window since similar performance can't be achieved in the same size package.  So its a fun what if game.  Since I am opting for added spectrum I want it all.  UV, Near IR, Mid IR, LW IR.  All with switchable/variable gain so I can make any spectrum, including visible, dominant and also be able to play with different combinations.  They all have their strengths and weaknesses.  I guess the real over the top question is how much spectral resolution I would like to have.  Again, why not ask for the moon and have the option of turning our eyes into portable spectrometers. 
 
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Offline calel

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #7 on: September 23, 2020, 06:25:38 pm »
it's possible the OP meant IR as an extra option not alternative to visible light

a bit like the Yautja aliens
 
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Offline Dark Volter

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #8 on: September 23, 2020, 11:49:53 pm »
it's possible the OP meant IR as an extra option not alternative to visible light

a bit like the Yautja aliens

I am pretty sure the Yautja Predators see only in Infrared though, so that is their only option!
(They use the bio mask to see other bands at will, which probably includes Visible)

Speaking of biology, i do not want to see people farting.
Would this even work?  That's not something you see in longwave infrared- it'd take, what , a narrow slice of the midwave band, and it'd have to stand out? Not sure this would really be a thing, might require holding up a narrow bandpass filter in front of your eyes to really see...(like how midwaves can see gas leaking from gas stations 


or this
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/12/climate/texas-methane-super-emitters.html
it took gas detection cameras with certain bands visible and the rest of the midwave area not visible to really bring gasses out
 
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Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #9 on: September 24, 2020, 03:15:16 am »
Speaking of biology, i do not want to see people farting.

In daytime you probably would want to avoid using a 2.8-3.0 micrometer filter on your fancy broadband eyeballs.

While the fantasy goes on, how about adding LIDAR vision with say 3 cm range resolution and a few dozen meters of range. 

Of course with all these optical inputs we are going to have to graft on a couple of extra occipital lobes to process all the information.
 
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Offline Bill W

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #10 on: September 24, 2020, 09:19:09 am »

Speaking of biology, i do not want to see people farting.

Would this even work?  That's not something you see in longwave infrared-

While MWIR is still easily the best for methane, methane is just visible on some LWIR cameras.  There is a big absorption band at 7µm which can be just in the passband with the right coatings on sensor and lens.
https://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=C74828&Type=IR-SPEC&Index=1#IR-SPEC

A lot is going against it. The low energy from an ambient scene at 7µm compared to the rest of the band being the worst.
 
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Offline Ultrapurple

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #11 on: September 24, 2020, 11:14:57 am »
I have often wondered about seeing in different wavebands - I suspect that's why I've equipped myself with gear that can convert different frequencies into something that I can perceive with my eyes. Would I want to swap my present eyes for a different band? No, but if I could augment my present senses with additional bands I'd have a good think about it.

I have looked at the world in LWIR, MWIR, NIR, UV and X-Ray I can fairly confidently say that most of the 'useful' information is packed into that small sliver of spectrum we refer to as 'visible light'. Next up is probably near-UV, and there are many species of insect, bird and (weirdly) fish that can perceive UV, some as a '4th colour' and others in conjunction with a smaller selection of lower visible bands.

Once you move to near-IR (from 'just below dark red' to about 1.1µm), you find there aren't really any 'colours' in the way we perceive them. Sure, some things are brighter or darker in those bands - the sky is black and foliage is bright - but I haven't generally noticed much difference between, say, 1100-900µm and 900-750µm. There will be odd instances of course but nothing like a peacock's feathers, a butterfly's wings or a garden full of flowers. I am not aware of any organism that has evolved particular sensitivity to those bands.

MWIR is a wide band and does have some interest, as there are a number of things that have sharp absorbencies within that range. It might be interesting to be able to see in that band but it'd have to be split into multiple separate 'colours' to be useful. Again, nothing I'm aware of has any senses in that band.

LWIR, again, is only slightly interesting. Yes, you can tell the temperature of household objects and could, probably, map different sub-bands to (say) R, G and B - but mostly all you'd see is that hotter things were bluer. Would this be more useful than our thermal cameras that just show hotter things as brighter? I don't know. It is interesting to know that a few organisms can - to a limited extent - 'see' in LWIR. Some snakes have specialised thermal receptors that let them detect prey. And, of course, you'll be well aware that your own skin has some thermal reception capability - your face can easily detect from some inches the thermal radiation from, say, a really fresh cup of tea. Hotter things like bonfires can be sensed much further away.

I haven't thought much about looking at lower frequencies than LWIR, though there might be some interesting stuff there if today's relatively primitive experiments with terahertz radiation are anything to go by. Below that and you're into radio of various sorts. I wonder what an electromagnetically-sensitive alien would make of our planet's incredible level of noise in the RF spectrum.

Back up now to UV and beyond. Yes, flowers look different in UV, as many include patterns that have co-evolved with pollinators' eyes to guide those insects to the 'good bits'. A very few humans can see by near-UV; there is a rare genetic condition that adds sensitivity to a fourth colour and an also-rare eye condition where the lens is missing, thus allowing UV to reach the retina (the lens is fairly opaque to UV and thus helps protect our retinas from damage).

Moving up the spectrum brings us into 'vacuum-UV', so-called because it won't propagate in air due to heavy absorption and would thus probably be useless as a visual sense.

Then you start getting into soft X-Rays. These would let you see through some less-dense things. As the energies increase to, say, 50keV you reach the area where you look right through skin and see skeletons - that's where medical imaging lives. But there aren't that many natural X-Ray emitters on our planet so even if you could see that range it would be pretty dark. But lift your (very sensitive) X-Ray eyes to the heavens and it would be a different story: there are numerous huge X-Ray emitters across the vastness of space so the night (and day?) sky would look very different. (As an aside, there are also things to see in the universe at other wavelengths from radio upwards; I just conveniently skipped over them in the earlier parts of this muse).

X-Raye give way to alpha, beta and gamma radiation, all of which have increasing penetrative power. If you wanted to be able to look straight through (say) a large ship or deep into the ground then gamma-ray vision would be quite interesting I suspect. But for everyday use you'd simply see straight through day-to-day objects - and anyway, many would be damaged by the sorts of levels of gamma radiation necessary to form any kind of useful image.

So there we have it: as far as I know there's quite a lot of 'nothing to be seen here' across the spectrum. Most life has evolved to use the same tiny sliver of 'visible light'. Even when you look at things like deep-water lantern fish, which inhabit depths where daylight can't penetrate and create their own light to lure prey - they light up in the same spectrum we see in. I can't imagine there's any reason to have prevented their biology from evolving to produce, say, IR or UV light (and the prey to have similar sensitivity), but that's just not how it is.

I think my final conclusion is that if we had a set of terminals on the side of our heads that let us bolt on supplementary wavelength sensors I'd probably go for a wide-range LWIR-to-near IR option - but as I can't envisage anything like that happening soon I'll happily stick to my toys and the Mk 1 eyeball.


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Offline Fraser

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #12 on: September 24, 2020, 11:58:55 am »
Ultrapurple,

It has already been done...... The Borg ! They bolt on eye enhancements and implants to provide an optical advantage over their enemies  :-+

Oh hold on a minute, they are just the product of a writer for Star Trek  :-DD

Human augmentation with technology can be a scary topic but science is coming up with some very clever ideas and techniques to give sight back to the blinds etc. Again, on the Star Trek front, Geordi La Forge is blind and has a visor coupled to his brain that can see in various wavelengths. I see multi spectral visors as a very real possibility as the Military have uses for such equipment on the battlefield  ;)

When thinking about enhanced ‘vision’, imagine being able to see sound and radio frequencies ! An ability to see sound would enable precision navigation to a target that is creating an acoustic signature. People have already built acoustic ‘torches’ to trace sounds to source.

None of this is that far fetched but the challenge has always been to find a low risk way to communicate augmentation outputs to the required areas of the brain. Drilling holes in people’s heads to insert wire probes is not something to be taken lightly by the surgeon or the patient ! The brain has an amazing capacity to adapt to change and theoretically it could adapt to additional ‘data’ inputs and could learn how to process that data.

I remember seeing an article on a completely bling chap who used a vision augmentation system that used cameras as his eyes and fed the produced Low resolution image data to a multi pixel plate that was sat on his tongue. His brain interpreted the electrical tingles from the tongue plate pixels as an image ! Low resolution yes, but it gave him a form of sight for navigation using a sense that could be taught to act as a vision receptor in place of the optic nerve and brains normal image processing centre. We also have hearing aid devices that couple to the brain directly and low resolution retina implants so science is taking baby steps towards the Borg approach to enhancing a human.

Interesting stuff  :-+
« Last Edit: September 24, 2020, 12:15:22 pm by Fraser »
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Offline Fraser

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #13 on: September 24, 2020, 12:02:00 pm »
Here is a video of a blind chap using the tongue vision device for the first time. An interesting watch  :-+

https://youtu.be/D1ehHIGzmPc

News item on the system

https://youtu.be/48evjcN73rw

In theory the data input to the system could be any form of imager, be it visible light, IR, UV or thermal  :)

This could potentially be recreated by a clever hobbyist  :-+

Fraser
« Last Edit: September 24, 2020, 12:09:39 pm by Fraser »
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Offline Fraser

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #14 on: September 24, 2020, 12:09:07 pm »
Artificial Retina implants...... Early days, but.....

https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/technology/2019/artificial-retina-implants

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Offline Ultrapurple

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #15 on: September 24, 2020, 01:48:27 pm »
@Fraser - Good points and useful references as always: thanks.

I dimly remember hearing about someone completely blind who had some sort of electrode matrix implanted to stimulate directly their optic nerve. Again, the resolution was low (think 8x8) and the first job was to work out the 'wiring' so that the 'pixels' lit up in some sensible sort of order, somewhat like a dot matrix display. I am stretching the back of my memory for this but I have a feeling it was more than ten years ago.

I understand that a fair proportion of research is carried out on people who have lost their sight, perhaps in one eye due to cancer, but still have parts of the 'vision plumbing' working. Given informed consent, it's considered ethically reasonable to wire someone's eyeball up to a computer if they're definitely going to lose it soon anyway.

A colleague of mine is facing something comparable with their hearing. A tumour has been detected on the link between one ear and the brain. The surgeon can remove the tumour cleanly - and has already done hundreds of successful similar operations - but the patient loses their hearing in that ear because the nerves are unavoidably severed. I suspect if my colleague was asked to participate in some kind of hearing research project using that ear before the cancer surgery they would be happy to co-operate (always assuming it didn't involve complications for the 'main show'), knowing that hearing a few computer-controlled odd buzzes in the doomed ear was contributing towards helping increase our knowledge.
« Last Edit: September 24, 2020, 02:58:57 pm by Ultrapurple »
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Offline Fraser

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #16 on: September 24, 2020, 02:02:10 pm »
Oxford Eye and Kings College Hospitals 2012.... 1500 pixels

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17936302

Fraser
« Last Edit: September 24, 2020, 02:05:22 pm by Fraser »
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Offline Fraser

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Offline Ultrapurple

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #18 on: September 24, 2020, 02:58:44 pm »
Thanks Fraser - and I'm glad you managed to find examples from 10 years ago, thus validating my hazy memories!

The interesting thing, from my point of view, is that there doesn't appear to have been a massive leap forward either in capabilities or of the basic devices becoming commonplace. I find it hard to believe that there has been no further research in a decade.

One day I hope we'll see some kind of light-powered vision chip that can be implanted at the end of an optic nerve and incorporate either a camera or artificial retina (depending on the state of the eye) and provide a usable degree of vision.

I don't believe I'm alone in this dream.
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Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #19 on: September 24, 2020, 03:38:48 pm »
While I agree with ultra purple that the vast majority of information we we are interested in is in the visual, there are obvious benefits to the other bands.  It is why so much equipment is now available.  The two most obvious are the ability to see when the big torch in the sky is on the other side of the planet, and better ability to see when smoke or fog are around.

Perhaps the best analogy, color blind people do quite well without the extra information provided by fully operable cone cells.  But the rest of us value that so much that it drove the development of a complete upgrade to the television system.

As an aside, the population of people who can see the near UV used to be quite large as it included all those who had cataract surgery.  Now that such surgery includes a lens replacement I assume that the replacement lens blocks the near UV, but I don't really know.  Those I know who had the old surgery never mentioned any benefits other than being able to see coating leaks on fluorescent bulbs.
 
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Offline Ultrapurple

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #20 on: September 24, 2020, 03:44:01 pm »
My mother had cataract surgery in her early 80s and the first thing she said was how all the blue colourss were so much more vibrant. I suspect it's because of something like Rayleigh scattering in the cataract - but she really loved the new, bluer skies.
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Offline Fraser

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #21 on: September 24, 2020, 05:27:01 pm »
My father reported the same after he had new lenses fitted in his eyes. He said everything was so much crisper and a slight yellow cast was gone. I believe the ageing of the humans natural lens can lead to a yellowing and so filtration of light entering it. He particularly mentioned the brighter blues he saw after the replacement. Whilst on the topic of replacing lenses in the human eye, it us getting very high tech these days with single distance (normally requiring the person to wear reading glasses) and multiple distance lenses ! I think, but I am not sure, that a complex lens shape provides good focus at different distances to different parts of the retina and the brain selects the clearest inage received and ignores the out of focus areas. I think the focus zones are concentric rings around the main central focus area. All. Lever stuff but the brain does take some time to make sense of the changes to its imaging input characteristics.

Fraser
« Last Edit: September 24, 2020, 05:32:50 pm by Fraser »
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Offline Bill W

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #22 on: September 24, 2020, 07:11:14 pm »
The strangest effect is when working in a (former) photo-etch area which has yellow tint / lighting.  You very quickly get used to the colour cast, but stepping back outside into the 'purple-land' of normal lighting is very odd.
For me it only lasted a few minutes

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Offline Ultrapurple

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #23 on: September 25, 2020, 07:55:24 am »
At Tate Modern last year one floor of the elevator lobby was illuminated with bright, essentially monochromatic light (sodium yellow I think) and it gave the very curious effect of black-and-white vision - one rapidly 'tuned out' the yellowness but of course there was no other colour.

Sainsbury's (a major UK supermarket chain) has a corporate identity based on an orange colour. Unfortunately this means that their name is invisible on posters illuminated by sodium lighting.
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Offline bap2703

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Re: If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it?
« Reply #24 on: September 26, 2020, 07:15:40 pm »
There are also colour engineered lighting in supermarkets around vegetables/fruits/meat.
These really fuck up vision.

I wonder if some people have the equivalent of absolute pitch but for vision.


For the original question: I wear (glass) glasses so I'd be pretty annoyed by having a LWIR vision.
[edit] Plus that unmovable HTI logo in the corner would be annoying  ;D
« Last Edit: September 26, 2020, 07:17:46 pm by bap2703 »
 
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