Kind: captions
Language: en
- What happens when you take
the world's best night vision goggles
into the world's darkest room?
- You start to feel a little strange.
And sometimes start to get
a little bit of vertigo.
- Can you tell the difference
between your eyes being closed and open?
- Should not be able
to. It'll be that dark.
- Three
- Basically zero light
in here.
- Two.
- Almost no photons.
Invisible. That's right.
- One.
- Oh, I'm ready.
- Pitch darkness.
(laughs) No way. This is insane.
These are the PVS-31As.
That is incredible.
One of the best night
vision goggles in the world.
It is literally like night and day.
We visited a Navy base in Crane, Indiana
to put them to the test
in all kinds of darkness.
Now things are gonna get real.
It's my first time looking
through night vision goggles.
- I'm going to pan these down.
- Oh wow. (laughs)
Oh my God.
To make a video about
night vision goggles,
we had to film in the pitch
dark, which is really hard,
because cameras work by focusing photons
of light down onto a sensor.
And there, the photons
knock off electrons,
generating a charge,
which is converted into a voltage
and digitized into ones
and zeros for each pixel.
Now, there's a setting we made
use of, which is called ISO,
which essentially boosts that voltage
to make the whole image brighter.
For reference, this is
what a scene lit only
by a single candle looks like
at an elevated ISO of 6,400.
Now, in a split screen,
let me show you what this
looks like at an ISO of 64,000.
Now you can see a lot more
detail in the shadows.
This is pretty similar
to the level of detail
that the human eye can see
in low-light situations.
And now this is what it looks like
on our camera's maximum ISO of 409,600.
All the dark scenes in
this video were shot
at this maximum ISO.
But look how dark it is compared
to just a single candle.
This is because the Navy base was located
in the middle of nowhere,
and we turned off all the streetlights.
All right.
Plus, we planned the shoot specifically
for a moonless night.
In these conditions,
I'm gonna try to drive a
military tactical vehicle
with nothing but night
vision goggles on for sight.
I hope that's in drive.
But the type of night vision
goggles you use is essential.
All affordable night vision
goggles work the same way,
and they're basically the same
as strapping a flashlight onto your head.
Except the light they give off
is not visible, but near infrared,
wavelengths that are just
longer than our eyes can see.
Then they have a camera that can capture
that near-infrared light
and display what the camera
sees on a screen on the back.
This is the simplest and
cheapest version of night vision.
It's called active illumination.
There are actually three
different types of night vision.
- Night vision is different
categories of technologies:
ones that create their own light,
ones that amplify existing light,
and ones that image in the
emissive infrared bands.
- And while the other types
of night vision can cost thousands,
our active illuminators
cost less than $200.
It's very zoomed in, I feel like.
(laughter)
- It's not a one-to-one?
- It's not a one-to-one.
Because they're far cheaper
and easier to make than any
other kind of night vision,
active illumination is what's used
in almost all commercial
night vision goggles
or nighttime security cameras.
These were the first night
vision goggles I wore
to attempt to drive in pure darkness.
I have no idea where the focus is.
If you could see this,
you would be terrified.
I'm looking out at the road,
and I have the focus
set to the first cone.
Oh my goodness, this is not advisable.
I have no idea how fast we're going.
The problem with these goggles
is it feels very zoomed in.
It is bouncing,
and it's not really bouncing
in time with anything.
It is just like, bouncing.
If we hit a parked car right
now, I would not be surprised.
- Oh God.
- Okay, straight. Straighten it out.
- Straight, straight.
- Straight?
- Straighten it out.
- Ben has military
night vision goggles on,
so he can actually see where we're going.
- More to the left, more to the left. Yep.
And we're probably good.
- Oh!
If I hadn't been directed from behind,
we would've crashed so many times.
I also feel a little bit
sick. So there's that.
This is one of the big drawbacks
of active illumination.
There's a significant delay
between what the camera sees
and what's displayed on screen.
- For most digital systems,
the fastest you could ever
get is the frame rate.
So if it's 24 frames per second,
the fastest you could be in the delay
is about 1/24 of a second.
Tens of milliseconds, maybe.
- That's enough to make
people get motion sickness
and lose their coordination.
Oh boy. Do you wanna throw me a Frisbee?
(mischievous music)
(Frisbee scraping)
- (laughs) You don't even move.
- I can't see anything.
(mischievous music)
(Frisbee scraping)
(Emily laughs)
I think I'm gonna have to
take these off shortly.
There is crazy rolling shutter,
and just everything's jiggling
around in front of me.
Another drawback of active illumination
is that your range limited,
since you can only see as
far as the light shines.
But the main reason you can't use these
in the military is simple.
They aren't passive.
There's a bright beacon
of near-infrared light,
so enemies can easily spot you.
In fact, military night vision goggles are
a totally different technology.
But they can still see
in the near infrared.
And this is why we've
been filming through them
to capture the light from
the active illuminators.
Have you ever been out at
night with night vision goggles
and sort of spotted someone
who's got like, an active
illumination device?
- Yeah, no comment on that one.
- (laughs) Fair enough.
Military night vision goggles
need to be far more concealed,
so they don't use active illuminators.
Instead, they rely exclusively
on the second type of night vision:
image intensification.
So should we try good goggles now?
Oh my goodness. It is
literally like night and day.
All right, let's do this.
(exhilarating music)
- Oh, he's off with so much confidence.
- Because I can see.
- Oh my god.
- I'm going straight for the cone.
I'm gonna go to the left of this cone,
then I'm gonna go in between them.
Oh, yes.
- Whoa.
- It's just like driving in the day.
This technology uses only the
existing light from a scene.
When photons enter goggles,
like these PVS-31As,
they get physically amplified
so that way more photons
come out the other end
to reach your eyes.
And in terms of like, how much
brighter it makes the light,
can you comment on that?
- Yeah, it's definitely at least
on the order of thousands.
- Thousands of times brighter.
- Yeah.
- And they're very light,
so people can wear them for
more than 10 hours straight.
All powered by a single AA battery.
Driving the vehicle now was super easy.
So easy that I got a
little bit overconfident.
- Maybe a little slower on the corner.
- Okay.
And since the goggles don't
use a camera or display,
there's almost no delay in what you see.
So you can shake the goggles,
and the world just moves with you.
- The time from light in to
light back out is very short.
You can get down to microsecond
levels, maybe even quicker.
Nanosecond levels.
- It's as if there are
no goggles there at all.
No, I can see so incredibly well.
Let me compare to like, no night vision.
Oh my goodness.
Man, the world looks so much
better through these goggles.
This is when we found an
unexpected benefit of night vision.
(delicate ethereal music)
The stars are phenomenal.
Through the goggles, starlight
gets amplified enough
to light your entire environment.
This also means that the
entire night sky gets revealed
in its full glory.
Emily, you are gonna have your mind blown
when you see through these.
- Oh my god. You can see
like, so many satellites.
Oh, and you can see the
Milky Way so clearly.
Okay. Yeah, I can drive with this.
Oh my god, this stretch is gorgeous.
And it all looks like
you're driving in snow.
Like, everything is sparkly
and white. It's so fun.
Honestly, I find it really relaxing.
- The one problem I noticed is
that these night vision goggles have
a limited field of view.
You got no peripheral, really.
- None, none.
I think I can, like,
right now with my hands,
I can get up to like, this far.
- But the Navy have one
set of goggles even better
than the ones we've been using.
(mysterious music)
These are the GPNVG-18s.
They also use image intensification,
but now it's applied to four tubes
to fill your field of view.
- The way this optic is
combining the four tubes,
it's combining it into one sort of ellipse
into your eye so that you can look
with your eye side to side,
without having to move your head.
- They're the most
expensive NVGs in the world.
They retail for over $40,000 online.
They're also the same goggles
which were used in the SEAL Team Six raid
on Osama bin Laden in 2011.
(engine roaring)
That's amazing.
Yeah, I'd be happy to do
anything in these goggles.
Yes!
It just makes you so much more
confident to be able to see.
The last thing that makes
these military goggles feel
so natural is their incredible resolution.
- When we characterize
a night vision tube,
we don't think about it in terms of pixels
or resolution in that sense.
We think about it in terms
of line pairs per millimeter.
So how many line pairs can you resolve
within one millimeter of physical space?
- For a pair of night vision
goggles to be military grade,
they need to be able to resolve
at least 64 line pairs per millimeter.
- So there's a almost qualitative-like,
but very skilled and historic process
for how these are quantified
for their performance.
- Is it like years of
training, or is it...
- I'd say within six months
we could have somebody
up to speed.
- Wow.
- For this I'm gonna go completely dark.
- Okay, there's a bright
chart right in there.
It says plus two on one
side. Does it say that?
- Maybe can't say what it really says.
- Okay. I won't say what it really says.
- We ran into this issue a lot.
- Oh, I can't really answer that.
Yeah, no comment on that one.
(Derek laughs)
I cannot comment on that.
So the process to make
the microchannel plate
and the photocathode,
yeah, we can't talk about that, either.
- (laughs) So much about
the night vision goggles
is a secret, since they're
still cutting edge.
This video is the absolute limit
of what the Navy is
willing to reveal publicly
about their night vision.
Though we're not allowed
to show the exact bar test,
we can show these.
- You see similar bars that we had
in the night vision are out
here, through the trees.
And then we've got,
if we maybe go towards this other corner,
you could see at different distances.
And the bigger the optic gets,
the farther away you can see.
And so you need farther and
farther away calibration targets
to understand the resolution
and the quality of those images.
We do a lot of lab characterization
and modeling to predict
how far it'll be able to see,
but the ultimate test is to
come out into the real world.
- We use line pairs per millimeter
to describe the goggles' resolution
because image intensification
is analog, not digital.
This is the secret to how they emulate
our normal vision so well.
Digital cameras have refresh rates
and resolution limits to worry about
because they're converting photons
into discrete values on pixels.
But image intensifiers are a continuous,
real-time, one-to-one
way to amplify light.
This is how it works.
In a dark scene,
limited light from things like
stars reflect off the scene
and sends some photons
toward the image intensification tube.
The lens focuses these
photons onto the tube
as an upside-down image, where
they go through three steps.
First, the photon hits a thin
plate called a photocathode,
made from semiconductors
or alkaline metals.
When a photon hits the plate,
an electron in that part
of the plate gets excited
and is ejected into the vacuum.
Next, the electrons are accelerated
through the vacuum tube by a voltage.
They head straight into
another thin plate,
called the microchannel plate,
and this is made from insulating
material, often glass,
with about 6 million tiny channels in it.
These are all angled at about five degrees
to get incoming electrons to
collide with the channel walls.
When they do,
they release more electrons
from the wall material,
which collide even more with the walls,
releasing more electrons,
creating an electron avalanche.
So a few electrons go in,
and a flood of thousands come out.
Then this flood of electrons
leaves each channel
and gets accelerated in a straight line
by another high voltage to
hit a phosphorous screen.
This is just a screen made of material
that glows when exposed to radiation.
So it converts the electron kinetic energy
back into visible photons for you to see.
So every photon
that enters the tube gets
multiplied thousands of times over
while maintaining its position,
which makes for a brighter
but otherwise identical image.
As a last step,
there are 20 million
optical fibers attached
to the phosphorus screen that
twist the image right side up.
(soft music)
- The photocathode,
the microchannel plate,
that vacuum gap, the phosphorus screen,
is all in this first section.
About the width of my fingernail.
The rest of this space
is the fiber optic twist.
- Oh wow.
For decades, the phosphorus
screen was always green.
It's this historic phosphor
choice that's responsible
for all the classic green
night vision we know
from movies or video games.
But in dark conditions the
human eye doesn't see best
in the green part of the spectrum.
There are two types of
photoreceptors on your retina:
rods and cones.
Cones are better for well-lit vision,
and they're good at distinguishing color.
They're located in the
center of your retina.
Rods are better for low-light vision,
and they're located at
the edges of your retina.
This is why you can
sometimes see dim stars
out of the corner of your eye,
but they disappear if you
look straight at them.
The light sensitivity of rods peaks
in the blue part of the visible spectrum.
So that's why our PVS-31As look like this.
They've been upgraded to white phosphor,
which looks slightly blue overall,
making it easier for people to make out.
To see how well these night
vision goggles amplify light,
we put them in a well-lit room
and covered them up entirely,
except for a little thumbtack hole.
This lets in only a tiny bit of light.
But the view through the goggles
is still brighter than the room itself.
We couldn't expose the
night vision goggles
to any more light than this,
but not because of
anything like the movies,
where bright light is enough
to incapacitate people
in night vision goggles.
- So what would happen if
we just turned on the lights
without the cap?
Would this just turn white?
- It would still function,
but you wouldn't want to do that
for a very long period of time.
It's got a current limiter
in how much charge can be
absorbed by the screen,
and increasing the light
intensity saturates
that component of the circuit.
- But what happens if we
push image intensification
to its opposite limit,
by using the goggles in a
room with no light at all?
If you want to test night vision goggles,
you gotta go to the place
where it is absolutely pitch dark,
underground, all sealed
off, basically no photons.
It's gonna be completely disorienting.
- So we're in an underground range here
at the Navy base, Crane.
And this place is usually used
to test small arms weapons,
but we can also seal it
up and make it very dark,
all the way down to
where there's almost no
visible light whatsoever.
- So there's basically zero light in here,
almost no photons.
- In the visible. That's right.
- We are now going to
turn off all the lights,
make it completely pitch black in here,
but on top of that, the
range is full of smoke.
So even with night vision goggles,
we might have no luck at all.
If you are in pure darkness
for a long period of time,
what happens?
- You start to feel a little strange.
Kind of like being in an anechoic chamber,
where you can't hear things.
The lack of sensory
perception can sometimes start
to give a little bit of vertigo
or uneasy feeling to some.
- Okay.
- Three, two, one.
- Pitch darkness.
Okay, my night vision's on.
- Wow, I actually can't
see anything through these.
- With PBS-31As in pure darkness,
you mainly just see their
analog processing in effect.
- Oh my god, it just
looks like a blizzard.
- When I look that way,
I see almost nothing.
I just get snow.
All this noise comes from
electrons getting pulled
through the goggles in two ways.
One is thermionic emission.
Just due to thermal energy,
some electrons will have enough
energy to escape the metal.
And the other is due
to the electric field.
There's such a strong
electric field in that tube
that it'll pull some electrons
off the photo cathode.
Can you make out the face?
'Cause I mean,
there's a little bit of light
coming out of the goggles,
which might hit my face.
Because image intensification
can only amplify existing light,
its one limitation is that
it requires a light source.
It can be tiny, but there
has to be something.
If you're in absolute darkness,
even active illumination is a better bet.
Now, this is advantageous
because if you're in a really black room,
then you do kind of need
to light it a little bit.
Unless you use the final
type of night vision:
thermal imaging.
With my naked eye, I can't
make out the exit sign,
but with the goggles I know it's up there.
While image intensification attempts
to match your normal vision,
thermal imaging goes beyond it.
In the electromagnetic spectrum,
the infrared range has longer wavelengths
than the visible range.
All the shorter wavelengths up
to mid-wave infrared light are reflective,
meaning that everyday objects
don't emit these wavelengths
on their own.
You need a light source.
To see my shirt, we can't be in the dark.
You need visible light to
reflect the blue to your eyes.
And that's why we needed
the near-infrared lights
on the active illumination devices.
But the long infrared
range is actually emissive,
meaning that it doesn't
need a light source at all.
That's because all objects
emit electromagnetic radiation,
and the shape of their
spectra follows Planck's law.
You can see that only
extremely hot objects
like stars have significant emission
in the shorter wavelengths
like visible light,
but virtually everything
emits in the infrared.
Because thermal imaging doesn't require
any external light, like
image intensifiers do,
and it doesn't need to
create its own light,
like active illuminators do,
it's undefeated in
completely black situations
like the underground range.
It's also the best choice
when there's fog or smoke
obstructing your view.
I am about to walk into
the fog in this range,
and we'll see if I
disappear in the visible,
and then you guys can look and see
if we can pick me up on
the infrared cameras.
- Yeah, I can't see you at all now.
(mischievous music)
Derek's getting his full workout.
- Whew. I had no idea we'd
be so emissive down there.
Thermal imaging also sees
things your eyes never could,
like objects that have
been buried underground
or recently touched by someone's hand.
The last advantage of thermal imaging
is its unbeatable range,
even better than the military
night vision goggles.
We set up a distance test
hundreds of meters away
from the tower to compare
the infrared cameras
against the PVS-31As.
To the naked eye on a moonless night,
this is what someone holding
a cigarette lighter looks like
at that distance.
This is how it looks through
the night vision goggles.
And this is how it looks
through the infrared cameras.
To get even more subtle and
remove all direct light,
this is what a person checking
their phone looks like
in those conditions.
Totally invisible to the naked eye,
discernible through the
night vision goggles,
and perfectly clear through
the infrared cameras.
But thermal imaging has
its weaknesses as well.
It's a digital system
with motion delays just
like active illumination.
Thermal imaging goggles aren't popular
because high-quality
infrared cameras are too big
and too power hungry to be portable.
And since they only
detect thermal radiation,
they can't even see lettering
on signs, for example.
This is looking at it in the infrared.
E, F, P, T, O, Z, L, P, E, D.
Anything that is visible solely due
to the way light reflects off it
is invisible to thermal cameras.
E, D, F, C. I don't know what that is.
Z, F, or Z, P.
(bell dinging)
Currently there is no one
best type of night vision.
They all have trade-offs
between things like resolution,
delay, light situation,
concealment, and portability.
The entire history of night
vision has been driven
by trying to minimize these trade-offs.
The first night vision technology,
known as Gen 0,
was developed for sniper
scopes during World War II
and the Korean War.
They used active infrared illumination,
much like the commercial
night vision goggles of today.
Then Gen 1 night vision was
developed for the Vietnam War.
These used basic image intensifier tubes
with just a photo cathode and screen.
No microchannel plate.
They stacked three of
them together in a row,
making them extremely bulky
and distorted to look through.
But the resulting scopes
were sensitive enough
to operate just off light
from the Moon and stars,
giving them the nickname Starlight.
Gen 2 night vision was
developed in the '60s and '70s
and added the microchannel plate
to the image intensifier tube,
increasing sensitivity so
that they could be used
in dark conditions, like on
cloudy or moonless nights.
This addition also made the
tubes much more compact,
allowing the first sets of
handheld night vision goggles
to be created.
The last generation, Gen 3,
became available in the late '80s.
These changed the photocathode material
into the semiconductor gallium arsenide
in order to better convert
photons to electrons.
They also coated the microchannel plate
with an ion barrier film
to increase the life
of the tube from 3,000 to 10,000 hours.
Though there hasn't been
an official new generation
of night vision goggles in over 30 years,
researchers are constantly
working on new improvements.
- Some of the basic research aspects
that I can talk about are looking at
how to extend the infrared regime
of the detectors overall.
Looking at areas to have devices
that can see farther into the infrared
with less noise than what we can today.
- How did you get into
night vision goggles?
- I was in the Marine Corps
in infantry in early 2000s,
and we still used a similar model
as this one right here in
Operation Iraqi Freedom.
That was one of the
actually driving factors
of why I got into this field.
I was using things like this
that were good, but not great.
You know, they could have been better.
We were also using infrared systems
that were not good at all.
And so kind of using those in the field
and feeling like, you know,
asking that question to yourself,
why is it not better?
- And the value of night vision extends
far beyond the military.
What sort of applications would people use
these goggles for?
- Search and rescue or places
where maybe there's not power.
It's too dark to see,
and you wanna be able
to do things quickly.
- Thermal imaging has grown
to become an entire industry,
with infrared cameras used in everything
from firefighting to building inspections,
to medical imaging.
And the microchannel plate first developed
for night vision now sits
aboard space telescopes,
like the Chandra X-ray Observatory,
helping us discover the hidden world
beyond what is simply visible by eye.
- Wow, that's beautiful.
I'm like, there are
like, tears in my eyes.
Okay, I'm good. (laughs)
I feel like no one can see
me 'cause it's in the dark,
but you probably can, if
you have night vision on.
(gentle piano music)
(machine whirring and trilling)
- Testing this night vision
technology perfectly illustrates
how there is no substitute
for hands-on exploration
to truly appreciate new innovations.
But you don't have to go all the way
to a military base to get
hands-on with cutting edge tech.
- In fact, you can do it from anywhere
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