• samplatt 5 hours ago

    These are gorgeous. Can't go past this without a heads-up for Greg Egan's 2014 short story Seventh Sight, where the protagonists hack their (at the time bleeding-edge tech) eye implants, allowing them to be part of a vanishingly-small group of people that can see into the infrared and ultraviolet.

    • TeMPOraL an hour ago

      Makes me think of Star Trek's Geordie LaForge, a blind engineer whose VISOR[0] not only gave him vision back, it extended it into IR, UV ranges and beyond[1].

      (Curiously, for a show from 1990s, the visualization of what he sees[2] is eerily similar to images produced by misconfigured diffusion models.)

      --

      [0] - Then futuristic; these days, I'm rather confident you could hack it up with VR glasses and enough sensors, leaving only the direct brain interface in the realm of sci-fi. Alas, the necessary suite of real sensors is still stupidly expensive AFAIK, way beyond a budget of a hobby project or even a product prototype.

      [1] - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/VISOR#Capabilities

      [2] - There's some screencaps in the MemoryAlpha article I linked; can't link directly, because the site detects hotlinking.

      • dcminter 3 hours ago

        I think it was in a Daedalus article that I read a passing reference to a technician who had had an operation for cataracts - the synthetic lens then allowed them to see a little way into the ultraviolet and thus they were able to calibrate a spectrometer "by eye" !

        Edit: Ok, I looked it up... from the Daedalus column in New Scientist in May 1969:

        "... Daedalus recalls the story of a professor of spectroscopy who lost an eye-lens in an explosion. He was given corrective spectacles with enough UV transparency to let him see some way into this region of the spectrum. Accordingly, he could line up the departmental UV spectrometers by eye, and was much in demand!"

      • shrx an hour ago
        • sdflhasjd 4 hours ago

          I remember removing the IR filter from a cheap webcam and seeing everything in a new light (haha, pun intended) was fascinating. One of my black coats that didn't get hot under the sun and appeared more reflective and. I remember some opaque things like Coke being much more translucent.

          These winning photos are a bit boring my comparison, the ghostly effect of foliage in IR is cool but a bit overdone when there's so many and there were so many other interesting differences in every day objects.

          I'd love to do the same with my mirrorless camera but it's a quite destructive operation.