DARPA: ENVision program aims for night-vision goggles the size and weight of regular eyeglasses

DARPA announced its Enhanced Night Vision in eyeglass form (ENVision) program. The ENVision program focuses on developing prototypes of multi-band, wide-FOV night vision systems and investigating methods to amplify photon up-conversion processes from any IR band to visible light. ENVision aims to create lightweight NVGs that offer a wide FOV across multiple infrared (IR) spectrum bands without needing separate optics for each IR band. The goal is to enable night vision through fog, dust, and other obscurants as well as provide thermal vision—all via a single flat lens. A Proposers Day for interested participants is being held via webinar on January 21, 2021.

Besides the weight and field-of-view constraint, current NVGs provide only a narrow segment of the IR portion of the spectrum (typically near-IR) that limits what types of threats the viewer can see at night. Efforts to expand FOV and IR bandwidth to date have involved increasing the number of optics, which increases weight. The ENVision program is designed to break the paradigm that increased performance can only be achieved by an increase in weight. ENVision will also investigate the possibility of night vision using direct photon up-conversion from infrared to visible photons using thin materials.

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-01-tech-darpa-aims-night-vision-goggles.html