10/08/2026
Engineers have built glasses that let human eyes perceive a part of the world normally invisible to us: infrared light.
Researchers at the Beijing Institute of Technology developed a lightweight, 23-gram prototype that converts incoming infrared radiation into visible colors, allowing wearers to see infrared information alongside their normal view of the world.
At the heart of the device are mercury telluride colloidal quantum dots. These microscopic semiconductor particles absorb infrared photons and generate electrical charges. The charges are then directed into an OLED structure that produces visible colors such as red and cyan, encoding differences in infrared wavelength and intensity as colors the human eye can distinguish.
In laboratory demonstrations, the glasses produced sharp, color-coded images of infrared-illuminated shapes and moving objects while remaining transparent to ordinary visible light.
Unlike conventional night-vision systems that often represent infrared information mainly through brightness or monochrome imagery, the researchers designed this system to translate different infrared signals into distinct color variations.
The technology remains an experimental prototype, but researchers say the approach could eventually contribute to advanced navigation, augmented vision, specialized imaging systems and future visual prosthetics.
Source: Fu, C. et al. (2026). Multispectral infrared-to-full-color upconversion expanding human vision. Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aed0245.