Contact Lenses That See Better in the Dark

China has been busy turning sci-fi into R&D, and the latest chapter is night vision contact lenses that work best when you close your eyes. Yes, you read that right. Keep them open and they let you see near-infrared light. Shut them and the image actually gets clearer, because your eyelids block distracting visible light while infrared slips straight through.

The trick lies in a thin film of nanoparticles embedded in the lens. These particles absorb invisible infrared and re-emit it as visible light, effectively overlaying a ghostly second spectrum onto what you normally see. In trials, people wearing them could pick up infrared signals and even tell which direction they were coming from. No batteries, no headset, no green glow straight out of Call of Duty, just contacts that whisper another layer of reality into your eyes.

Of course, there are caveats. At the moment the lenses only respond to strong infrared sources, so don’t expect to stroll through a pitch-black forest like the Predator. The images are fuzzy, closer to flickers and shapes than crisp outlines. And nobody knows yet what wearing nanoparticles against your eyeballs every day will do in the long run.

Still, the implications are obvious. Firefighters navigating smoke, soldiers moving without goggles, surveillance operators who don’t need clunky headsets. Or, more optimistically, colour-blind users seeing shades they’ve never seen before. What starts as a lab trick quickly turns into something people will want, then something governments will regulate, and eventually something that ends up on Alibaba for £49.99 with free shipping.

Unlike China’s experiments with artificial womb robots, which felt like Black Mirror with a policy memo attached, these lenses are less about outsourcing humanity and more about augmenting it. They don’t make new life, they just let you see a little more of it, even with your eyes closed.