By Josh Perry, Editor
[email protected]

The AMPLIFY project, which is being conducted by European researchers under the European Union Horizon 2020 framework, seeks to enhance human visual perception through interactive digital technologies and it has recently involved new thermal imaging innovations.

Infrared glasses would give firefighters heightened visual perception to locate people trapped in a blaze. (AMPLIFY project)

According to a report from Horizon, The EU Research and Innovation Magazine, scientists at the University of Stuttgart (Germany) created prototypes of glasses that would trigger thermal images when the wearer squints.

As the article explained, “A camera incorporated into the frame produces images using visible light, near infrared and far infrared. These give the wearer the ability to see normal visible scenes, but also three-dimensional thermal images. Sensors capable of detecting the faint electrical signals produced by muscles are also built into the frames to pick up the movements associated with the eyes narrowing or squinting.”

One version of the glasses has been built into the helmets of firefighters to spot hidden fires or people trapped in burning buildings. Scientists believe this could lead to innovations such as glasses that zoom in on distant objects or slow down the action in front of the wearer.

Other visual enhancements include goggles with LED lights in the peripheral vision to help swimmers orient or glasses with 360-degree cameras to give the wearer eyes in the back of his or her head.

Another EU project taking place at the Institute of Photonics and Quantum Sciences at Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh, U.K.) is building a camera that can capture events previously impossible to see. The UPTIME project is using ultrafast lasers to flash lights in the range of 10-100 femtoseconds and designing systems to capture the phonons to show a picture of what is captured.

Read more about these projects at https://horizon-magazine.eu/article/pushing-bounds-vision-could-reveal-hidden-worlds.html.