I'm tired of science reporting overselling technology. They are starting with the idealized outcome: "this film lets you turn glasses into night vision!" When the reality is far from that. New technologies in development should be framed in terms of the goals and applications, but then establish more grounded facts of where the state of the art is, the proof of concept that exists, and the state that the technology is currently in.
Who cares about night vision. Unless I missed a whole lot of development in physics, the ability to passively shift frequencies from outside to inside of visible range is the cool thing. I'd like to wear this material during the day, possibly with a visible light attenuator in front. The world may look different in beautiful or practically important ways when viewed at wavelengths outside our visual range, and we won't know how much until we start actually seeing them as we move about.
Exactly; the article more or less obfuscates what the present proof of concept looks like. After opening with this dream of what sounds like an entirely passive system you could just select as a coating on your next Zenni Optical order, It makes no mention of current power requirements or how much space everything else takes up.
Would it fit in a Vision Pro? Is it currently 75 pounds of equipment spread over a test bench? The article is useless on these questions.
It's a selection/survivor bias going on too. The public doesn't want to read about some incremental gain in some subfield they have no expertise in. People interested in those are reading the journals and preprints and mailing lists and such.
Unfortunately, that means what typically makes it to widely shared mainstream science news is the clickbait sensationalist marketing hype. Sober analysis isn't good for TikTok...
