New Night Vision Tech Looks to Shed Pounds Off of Existing Gear
Night vision. Something that almost every boy dreams about having at one point or another. Some even grow up and buy night vision goggles to fulfill their boyhood fantasies. But invariably, they find out the truth about night vision equipment. It's REALLY REALLY heavy. It's a catch-22 if ever there was one; you can see in the dark, but you'll have to mount a heavy piece of delicate electronics on your head if you want to do so.
Recently, however, researchers at the University of Florida have come up with a new way to make night vision equipment that will help shed pounds off of existing gear.
Using funding fro DARPA, the researchers came up with an entirely new way of seeing in the dark, using Organic Light Emitting Diodes, or OLEDs. OLEDs are stimulated by the presence of infrared light, which is what night vision technology picks up and magnifies to allow its users to see in the dark. Using seven layers of OLEDs, the new technology picks up the infrared light in a dark environment, and then gets amplified into an image similar to the green-tinged ones you've probably seen on war footage on the Discovery Channel or CNN.
The best part of it, however, is how much lighter it will be than existing night vision technology. At only a few microns thick, it will weigh somewhere in the vicinity of a quarter of a pound. A far cry from anything currently on the market.
Although the researchers have only been able to employ this new tech in a 1 square centimeter sized prototype, they hope to be able to employ it in all sorts of ways (like windshields, cameras, and possibly even eyeglasses) within 18 months.
Source: Popsci via Gizmodo
