Digg

Discover the best of the web!
Learn more about Digg by taking the tour.

DIY Infrared Goggles for under $10

amasci.com — How to make near IR vision goggles for ~$10 with light filters and welders goggles. "The whole world looks blue-grey with deep red highlights. Many plants look frosty-whitish-pink with the goggles, but for normal human eyes they look green or greenish black. Sometimes you can see birds moving around deep inside the frosty white bushes and trees."

Bury

theRIAA 2 years 61 days ago, made popular 2 years 60 days ago

1133 diggs
digg it

theRIAA, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16this story has not been submited before.
here is google cashe for when his servers blow up...

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:GuoCZBAVwlkJ:www.amasci.com/amateur/irgoggl.html &hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1

i live near seattle, 20 min away from the PNTA hes talking about. 1st chance I get im making some

im almost certin this is legit.. look at links at bottom. searched google and found people have made these before...
Why cant we buy these???
- sobriquet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13It is legit, i went to a theater supply store and bought the materials for them. Keep in mind it's not FIR, where heat turns up different colors, its just NIR, so things are an eerie white. Still a good project for the $5 I spent on it.
- oak13, on 10/12/2007, -17/+0What kind of name is theRIAA?
- TaeBoX, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I read this about 5 years ago. Cool project then and still cool now.
- t3hX, on 10/12/2007, -10/+2I have read this ages ago, but not on digg, so I guess I'm not going to mark it as a dupe.
- matt0baba, on 10/12/2007, -0/+31fiters-8$
  welding goggles-10$
  looking like an idiot in public - priceless
- hammydude, on 10/12/2007, -8/+6No pictures means no digg!
- theRIAA, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7http://www.fukuoka-edu.ac.jp/~fukuhara/uvir/keshiki_ir2a_e.html
  
  pictures of IR photography. a little diffrent from what he sees but same idea (white trees)
- wbeaty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Why can't we buy these?" Because little kids won't bother to read the safety warnings, and they'll damage their retinas by staring at the sun. On the other hand, it should be possible to make an eye-safe version with low-power IR by using dyes which pass only a narrow peak at, say, 800nM.
jchalmer85, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15As a theatre person, I can totally vouch for the method he uses - Lee 181 definately has this effect. If you work in theatre, there's probably a burnt gel box somewhere - raid that and you're good. (That's what I did.)
- Tiak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Gah! We throw all of our burnt gels (that can't easily be converted for use for a smaller fixture) away.... So much wasted cool abilities... Since you seem to be a theater person, ever seen it used on stage?... I'm inerested in that more than anything else about it.
theRIAA, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1...would endeveloped film squares (IR filter i hear) taped to your face produce the same efect????
- mrASSMAN, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4no.
- burke, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I read something about converting a webcam into an IR cam with film, so you may be right. I think there's a more elegant solution than taping it to your face though.
- haxxorfreak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You can use film as an IR filter but it must be unexposed and developed E-6 process (otherwise known as slide film)
columbiaredhot, on 10/12/2007, -22/+2The goggles do nothing...
- deadfones, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13If you're going to quote an overused catchphrase, at least do it right. But in this case...
  
  The goggles, they do something!
p9s50W5k4GUD2c6, on 10/12/2007, -17/+4Is there a particular reason we should trust "theRIAA"? :)
- theRIAA, on 10/12/2007, -6/+3trust jchalmer85
zalaz, on 10/12/2007, -32/+1interesting story (i guess?). i don't feel it deserves a digg. i don't know for the life of me WHY it is #1 on digg. no disrespect to the submitter or author intended, i just don't get digg story placement sometimes.
- Murdats, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10well its not up to you is it, its up to the community as a whole
Daniel591992, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18Am I the only one that read Googles?
- zweben, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15Nope. I spent a minute thinking about what a do-it-yourself Google would entail.
- zopu, on 10/12/2007, -4/+31Why is it that EVERY story on digg is about Goggle??? I´m just sick of all these Goggle stories!
  
  oh wait...
sundancekid503, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16"Driving with the goggles was dangerous: I could see just fine, and cars' tailights looked abnormally bright, but red traffic lights were totally dark (here in Seattle they use red LEDs for stoplights which lack the IR output of the original incandescent bulb.) Some sorts of car tail lights, the LED kind, were also dark. "

Glad I don't live in Seattle.
Soave, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14The warning at the beginning is probably pretty important. If these goggles make your pupils open, your eyes will be more susceptible to UV rays, which can be very damaging. If possible, try to find something similar to what they put in polarizing sunglasses or whatever to block the UV rays.
- radu79, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Which is why that guy specified that his glasses do block the UV light as well.
bobgb4, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6" DANGER! POSSIBLE SAFETY HAZARD! I've worn the IR goggles in for hours at a time in bright Seattle sunlight. I'm not blind yet. The dark goggles make your pupils open up wide, but then the goggles don't block all that IR sunlight. Is this harmful? It hasn't hurt me yet, but I don't know if it's totally safe. My particular goggles contain glass for UV filters. Is this enough? I DON'T KNOW! At the very least, don't ever stare at the sun while wearing the goggles, you might get a nasty suprise later on (called Snow Blindness. Your cornea surface rots and sticks to your eyelids. Ewww.) DON'T STARE AT THE SUN!!!! "

...lol...
Linkage155, on 10/12/2007, -15/+4Google? What?
pedmond, on 10/12/2007, -15/+5This isn't IR vision at all, it's just very dark sunglasses. That's why they only work in a sunny day and not indoors. It's a nice phantasy, but it's all there is.

And by the way, people don't see in infrared. Otherwise we'd all be seeing on a warm summer night with no lights on, which we obviously don't.
- theRIAA, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13people do not see infared, but they can see NEAR INFARED LIGHT
- Tiak, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8Well, what is IS seeing isn't part of the visible spectrum, it's filtering out all violets, blues, greens, yellows, oranges, and all but very few reds.... And it obviously isn't just filtering out everything but the very end of the red part of the spectrum, because for one the traffic light example. Red LEDs of course, might only be a spedcific frequency, but the way it was described things that are red in the normally visible color spectrum didn't have any special properties, which would suggest at very least it's only wavelengths past that of normally visible red... Guess what they decided to call the area of the electromagnetic spectrum directly outside visible red?...
  
  Before posting wikipedia articles, you might want to look at links to other articles within that very article...
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_spectrum
  "electromagnetic radiation in this range of wavelengths is called visible light or simply light. There are no exact bounds to the visible spectrum; a typical human eye will respond to wavelengths from 400 to 700 nm, although some people may be able to perceive wavelengths from 380 to 780 nm"
  
  That would suggest that some people can see into the infared spectrum if it wasn't accompanied by other light, considering it officially starts at 750 nm (though red stops at around 700 nm). Of course, one would also assume that some wouldn't see anything but black using these goggles, but some people can't see all that much without them either...
- Tiak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Just another thing to note:He would only see infared with hotter things brighter and cooler things darker if he were seing a RANGE of the infared spectrum, since he's seeing a very narrow band of it, he'd basicly only see things at a certain specific temperature as brighter... Of couse the sun is rather hot itself, and infared waves do reflect, and can be absorbed, can they not?... Especially considering the sun is the only thing hot enough to really trigger this part of the spectrum he experienced, it makes it MORE credible, not less....
- galacticroot, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3"You are absolutely right. Infrared light, which is heat radiation, is not perceivable by humans - period. I don't know what band(s) of light the article writer is describing, but it's NOT heat radiation."
  
  Infrared light is not by itself "heat radiation". It is just regular light, like the kind you can see, only with a wavelength longer than the normally visible spectrum. Radiant heat transfer typically involves infrared light, but infrared light is not, and does not have to be produced by, heat.
  
  "If it were heat radiation, he would be seeing brighter shades on hotter things, and darker shades on cold things."
  
  Generally, objects emit black-body radiation almost completely in the far infrared range at room temperature. The human eye is unable to detect light at these wavelengths. For one thing, the cornea is opaque to those wavelengths and will absorb the light, preventing it from even getting to the retina.
  
  There is nothing special about "thermal vision". Our eyes work fairly well for it, but they just happen to work in the 1000-2000F range. Below that, and there isn't enough visible light to see easily, above that, and the shortest wavelengths start to move into the UV range and we can only see various brightnesses of glowing white light which our eyes cannot accurately measure.
- edzieba, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1'Heat Radiation' is a spurious term, and anyone who uses it in a serious context deserves a good knock on the head. IR is a range of wavelengths, between microwaves and the visible spectrum. It can be split into bands, usually termed things like 'near IR' (the goggles pass part of this band), 'far IR', and so on, the same way that light is split up into bands of 'red' or 'green'.
  
  'Heat radiation' is basically any radiation that an object not at a temperature of absolute zero emits (commonly known as Black Body radiation). If the object is very cold, it will only emit long radio wavelengths. If it is very hot, it can emit a broad spectrum peaking in the x-ray of gamma range. If it is red-hot, then it emits light with a peak in the red part of the visible spectrum. Most objects found on the earth are at a roughly uniform temperature, which happens to hover around the 'far IR' band. This is purely co-incidence, and IR has nothing to do with heat. The peak wavelength emitted is determined purely by quantum physics (binding energy and the energy of the individual quanta of that wavelength).
  NOTE: Below the peak wavelength, light is still emitted. Above it, no light is emitted.
kaidovak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I wonder what would happen if someone were to apply this filtering technique to a digital camera set to a low shutter speed? Of course you'd probably get just black on some of the camera models with IR filters over the CCD, but some must get through.
- msprout, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Some IR-filtering gels are used sometimes in traditional Photography, and it really does produce some pretty strange stuff. The only issue is, you could spend weeks mastering a single photo on a usual enlarger. Eyes weren't made for this stuff - mechanical or not.
  
  Oh yeah, and like everything specialized in photography, it's horrendously expensive. Ever seen a fat photographer? That's because we don't have money to eat, thanks to goddamn gel filters. I hate you, light!
- pgm_01, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I have an old Canon (a Powershot A20) that picks up IR, the easiest way to tell is to bring a TV remote close to the lens and press a button, if you see a bright light on the screen your camera can shoot IR.
- OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Look up "Sony Nightshot" and "naked" for the answer. Or read this:
  
  http://www.g4tv.com/techtvvault/features/36824/Video_Voyeurs.html
spankr, on 10/12/2007, -12/+3This is by *far* the most idiotic Digg story I have seen yet. You do not see IR with this. At best - you see something like what the author *thinks* IR looks like based on what movies and TV shows he has seen...

Reported.
YossarianDent, on 10/12/2007, -9/+1Someone needs to tell Triumph the Insult Comic Dog about this guy. He makes Star Wars geeks look suave.
wonginator1221, on 10/12/2007, -3/+15You can't see through clothing...

nothing worth reading here
- GotoDengo, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4LOL. I thought that was the unspoken point of them, too... kind of like the Sony infrared pass thru filters. If they don't do that.... really, what's the point? :)
- redneckblues, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2He did mention seeing through spandex somewhere in there. But proceed with caution there.
theRIAA, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5taken from wiki

"near infrared is the region closest in wavelength to the radiation detectable by the human eye"
EBFoxbat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3You're better off puting one of these on a black and white webcam which is way more IR sensative. Infact, I'm sure you could see all sorts of neat things if you cleanly block all visible light. ;)
- prh99, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2There was an article on how to do just that posted awhile ago. Basicly it involved removing the IR filter from the webcam and using few peace of film negative in its place to block visible light.
ironbear, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I've done this using the original infrared-transmitting black-appearing Lexan (not the less expensive gel version), recycled from a broken security camera. It really works, but the result is VERY dim to my eyes. I can also see infrared 720 nm LED's in a dark room...and so can nearly everyone (you may have a TV or other remote control like this). About security cameras: beware of shiny black squares of plastic, evildoers.
Tiak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Someone needs to start making clothing out of this stuff.... It'd make infared scopes/cameras so much more interesting.
LucasVB, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The guy describes what looks like an interesting They Live-like subliminal message scenario! :D

This sounds pretty good! Too bad I can't find these filters over here in Brazil. USA rocks because of this: you can get all sorts of cool ***** off the shelves.
- mikesum32, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2LucasVB
  I'd seen this long ago, but couldn't find it.
  
  I had a plan to do something like They Live. I thought maybe something clear in normal light, like nail polish, might be opaqe at NIR.
DrJones633, on 10/12/2007, -7/+0This is BS! It doesnt matter if you filter out the IR light all day The human eye can not see it, we do not have the cones and rods that detect it, thats why its not part of what we call the"visible light spectrum". The way real IR devices work is to convert IR into visible light, via a diplay panel of some type. I can't believe anyone dug this!
- shinynew, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6it simply filters out most of the usally visible light and therefore we see the tiny bit of the first portion of IR light.
Archailect, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Your rods and cones have multiple resonance peaks that result in this regime of really really red frequencies being detectable.
TwwIX, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Do any cheesy Vin Diesel one liners come with the goggles?
- YourTechSupport, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3*cough*penetrator mode*cough*
  
  Wait... you meant Pitch Black, I got nothing.
  
  Because the Goggles... DO NOTHING!!!
Legion303, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Will these goggles let you see IR lasers and LEDs? Maybe."

Will you have severe eye problems after staring at an IR laser? Probably.
twertyto, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4Why is everyone reading and making comments on this article a bunch of idiots? These are not IR goggles just far red light filters. I saw only one other comment mention this and it got buried. What the hell is wrong with you people?
- LucasVB, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3No, the goggles filter everything on the visible spectrum BUT the near IR, hence why it works: our eyes can see NIR, but we don't perceive it because of all the light on the rest of the spectrum. Even still, our perception of it is crap, so the pupils have to let a lot of NIR light in on a very clear day in order for us to see anything.
- wbeaty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The rods in human retinas are quite insensitive to wavelengths longer than 700nM. But their response doesn't suddenly go to zero. The farther past 700nM, the worse the eye's response. This means that there can be no real division between "red" and "infra-red." If you can't see 800nM, just make the light brighter. If at that brightness level you can't see 900nM... just make it brighter. For most purposes the line between visible and IR is at 700nM, but we can move that line by getting rid of shorter wavelengths and cranking up the illumination at the longer wavelengths. Of course at some point you're going to damage your retinas, if not burn off your eyebrows. Maybe it's possible to see 10 micron "thermal" wavelengths, but only if we use a nuclear bomb as the light source. And then your eyes aren't very useable afterwards.
icekold, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0It was Game Over as soon as I read the words "Your cornea surface rots and sticks to your eyelids."
wbeaty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Idea for Burning Man: build several tall narrow kiosks like phone booths or porta-potties. But build them from clear acrylic coated with a couple of layers of Lee 181 Congo Blue. People who climb inside will see the near-IR world. But also they'll see right through the neighboring kiosks as if they were transparent. People outside will of course see these opaque black monolith thingies standing in the desert, never knowing that there are folks inside waving at each other, taking clothes off, etc. (PS, I've been experimenting with the goggles since 1996 or so, and still have suffered no eye damage. But then I don't use them to stare at the sun!)
- MistressRoninS, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I have wondered about the use of industrial goggles for fashion in night clubs by so many of my friends, if people are finding use for them at Burning Man, an actual function in apposed to the "wearing them on the forehead to look cool and industrial with no other function" style. Thanks for the input. :)
  MR
wbeaty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Instead of goggles, use LEE 181 to play with IR cameras. Get a black and white video camera (most any will do.) Color video cameras have an IR-blocking filter, but most B/W cameras do not. And these cameras have quite a lot of IR sensitivity. Cover the lens with a few layers of congo blue filter, and you have an IR-only camera. Now use your IR video camera to observe a sheet of congo blue filter. The filter looks almost black to human eyes, but the camera can't see it. On video, the filter sheets look almost as transparent as glass. Now put some nasty graffitti or raunchy artwork on your walls, but cover it with congo blue filter sheets. Humans will see the shiny black squares, but IR cameras will see the original art. Or as above, make a cubical transparent box from lexan and congo blue. Humans can't see what's in the black box, but a night-vision device or an IR camera will make the box "go away."
CalipsoII, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1After reading a similiar article on the net about near-infrared mods, I proceeded to tear down an old digital camera and mod it to shoot only infrared. It'll do still pictures and video. I soldered 4 high-power infrared LED's into the flash socket and wired them to the internal battery so the camera will shoot video in the pitch dark and still have illumination.

Interesting point to note: images shot with one of these cameras will not pick up a lit LCD monitor, they simply appear as a black square.
- form51, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Calipso.. I want to mess around with some Near IR LEDs and the gels. Can you point me to the place you purchased the LEDs?
  
  Thanks
  -form
Roche, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This can be quite dangerous, at least when used in daylight. This quote from NASA specifically deals with looking at the sun, but it should caution you to be... well... cautious. "these transmit high levels of invisible infrared radiation which can cause a thermal retinal burn"

http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/SEhelp/safety2.html
- theRIAA, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1(so dont look at the sun)
restlessdesign, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1You can also just double up two sheets of unexposed E-6 film. It probably won't fit on the goggles (unless you use 120 or 4x5), but 35mm can be fitted over your flash unit so you don't light up an entire room while shooting.
restlessdesign, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Edit: After reading that article, it looks like E-6 would still be unsafe to use for looking at the sun. True black and white film (not the kind that says it can be processed using C-41) that has been exposed to maximum density however, can!
Login or register to add a comment

Create a new account or login to join in the conversation on Digg. You'll also be able to Digg stories to help promote things you like.

DIY Infrared Goggles for under $10

Login or register to add a comment