Program Summary
Despite decades of development, current night vision (NV) systems are bulky and heavy, resulting in a large torque on the wearer’s neck. This torque greatly limits the wearer’s agility and often leads to chronic injury over prolonged use. Additionally, these systems provide the wearer with a narrow field of view (FOV) and generally have limited spectral access to the near-infrared (NIR), greatly limiting situational awareness.
The DARPA ENVision program will leverage recent advances in planar optics and transduction materials to develop novel direct-view NV systems that demonstrate an increased FOV and enhanced visual access across infrared bands, all contained in a low-torque eyeglass form factor.
ENVision will also investigate the fundamental limits of low-input-intensity photon upconversion bandwidth and efficiency. These new insights could potentially lead to further transformative NV systems that require no optics or transduction, but simply directly upconvert ambient infrared light into the visible.