Future smartphones could have night vision thanks to MIT

Ever wonder why your smartphone doesn’t have night vision? I mean, it can’t be that advanced of a technology, right? They used night vision goggles in World War II, for crying out loud. My phone can recognize my face and read my fingerprint. Why no night vision? Well it turns out that even though night vision isn’t all that technically difficult, making it cheap and small is a bit of a hassle. The problem is cooling. Normal cameras behave very similarly to the human eye in that they detect light bouncing off of objects. If there’s no light source, they can’t see anything. However, night vision devices work differently. They detect infrared light that radiates off all warm bodies. The problem is that the sensors that detect this heat have to be kept really cool. Otherwise their view of the world would be blotted out by all the infrared noise of the devices containing them. Historically this has been done with a system of refrigerants, much like a liquid-cooled computer. That kind of technology is bulky and cumbersome, and it can get expensive.