from Hacker News

Biologically extending human vision into the near-infrared: Initial success

by irollboozers on 8/21/14, 11:34 PM with 60 comments

  • by JacobAldridge on 8/22/14, 12:34 AM

    Link to the original Project Page, if (like me) you're playing catch up on the experiment:

    https://experiment.com/projects/can-we-biologically-extend-t...

  • by gus_massa on 8/22/14, 11:18 AM

    Copy of a comment I made in a previous submission, a few hour ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8207152

    Well, the data is very noisy. The main problem is that this data doesn't have a before/after comparison. Is the 850nm light visible now or it was always visible???

    It's also very difficult to make a fair comparison. The room must be the same, the light sources must be the same (a new coffeepot with a small led can ruin the experiment, removing a coffeepot because it has recently broken can ruin the experiment).

    For a preliminary experiment, the before-after comparison is enough. For a serious experiment you need many voluntaries, compare the before-after signals of them all at the same time in the same experimental conditions, and double blind testing.

    There is a small possibility that they are measuring "excitement" instead of light. The subject hears that they are now going to test with very near infrared light. He got exited. They measure that. Perhaps the flash makes a slight sound, perhaps the light operator makes a slight sound. (Perhaps the 850nm flash makes a sound that the other flashes don't make?)

  • by specialp on 8/22/14, 5:54 AM

    This could certainly be possible. Jay Neitz did experiments on monkeys to cure colorblindness using gene therapy and was successful. [1] He has said that perhaps one day humans can have genes for more color receptors added to be able to see more colors as some birds do.

    1. http://www.neitzvision.com/content/genetherapy.html

  • by leoc on 8/22/14, 5:05 AM

  • by diziet on 8/21/14, 11:45 PM

    I'd love to see the ERG readings for more experiments and before vs after at 950nm~

  • by dedward on 8/22/14, 2:29 AM

    I seem to recall an article from some years back about someone using welding goggles with multiple layers of a specific blue filter on a very bright day and being able to see near-IR.. or something darn close to it.

  • by qwerta on 8/22/14, 11:33 AM

    My astronomy friends are into hard-core start gazing. One experiment was in La Palma island with near-perfect night sky at 8 000 feet. One guy could see 8.1 magnitude stars at 80% cases (independent stats). With oxygen and some training he would probably get to 8.5 magnitudes.

    There are similar stories with sound etc. I think some people can see near infrared, it is just question of finding them.

  • by sigil on 8/22/14, 12:49 AM

    What an interesting experiment. Could there be some basis, after all, to the urban legend that eating carrots improves night vision? Carotenes are "partly metabolized into Vitamin A" [1], but this experiment is skipping the precursors and going straight for what I assume are large and exclusive doses of Vitamin A. Can it really be that no one has tried this before?

    Related and probably equally silly idea: I've always wanted a pair of sunglasses that could tune in to different EM spectra. How far are we from that? Night vision goggles are bulky because they need external power to do the frequency shifting, right?

    [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrot#Nutrition

  • by tdaltonc on 8/22/14, 5:53 AM

    When is the flash on and when is it off in these plot? What would these plots look like in a control subject? Does the subject have any other indication of when the flashes are occurring?

    I know that this isn't written to be read critically, but I don't know what the take-away is.

  • by tylermenezes on 8/22/14, 2:08 AM

    What's really cool is that this entire project was done for under $5k!

  • by Garbledup on 8/22/14, 12:52 AM

    Through technological enhancement[1] or practice it seems that anyone can make an attempt at monitoring & responding too these frequencies.

    [1]http://eyewiki.aao.org/Intravitreal_Injections

  • by TTPrograms on 8/22/14, 2:21 AM

    Those plots really need labels.

  • by _greim_ on 8/22/14, 4:19 AM

    > near-infrared

    So, still red then?

  • by userbinator on 8/22/14, 2:00 AM

    This is particularly relevant given that there's been a recent trend of interest in thermal imaging cameras... of course, the range of those is in much longer wavelengths.