Homemade Infrared Goggles! For Under $10

Step 5 Put it all together...

Take 4 blue gels and insert them in the eyepiece assemblies and then screw them back on to your new IR-Goggles. Now, wait for a very bright sunny day and go outside! You won't believe what you see. DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUN!! Serious, permanent eye damage can occur in seconds. Then for another effect, add the red gel to each eyepiece and see the difference. Now here is the video!

Comments

[rodonn]

Has anyone tried to to this with the new UV end of the spectrum. The human eye is (without its lens) very sensitive to near UV (more so than certain 'visible' blue wavelengths)

[ExtraMedium]

If you had an IR torch would this detect it at night?

[Mr. Rig It]

Hello all. Regardless if you can see with them at night, see certain spectrum's during the day or see ghosts, this was put together very well and safety notes were put into as well. The video and commentary were very well done. Good job. Now I do have one question, other than just looking around and seeing another spectrum what can I do with them "practically speaking" how can I put them to use? Thanks for a well presented instructable.

[jakepoop333]

Good point. Well made.

[Icequeen]

(removed by author or community request)

[Mr. Rig It]

Well I am sure someone will come up with a spinoff idea that will be just as cool.

[FreakCitySF]

KipKay has made close to 70,000 thousand in metacafe videos. Who is the man behind the voice. Who is Kipkay!

[nuntoss]

i am kipkay!!!

[Derin]

no kipkays user name is Kipkay...all hail kipkay...

[DIYmaker96]

Kipkay for president.

[agg]

Unfortunatley, the blue filter material used has a secondary peak in the visible orange-red spectrum. As a result, the goggles transmit about 0.12% at 680 nm up to about 12.9% at 700 nm, as opposed to around 21% up to 48% in the near ir. This creates a band of visible light in an area where the eye is moderately sensitive that is pretty much guaranteed to drown out any ir receptivity because even those not completely blind to near ir are nearly so. These are basically very complex rose colored glasses.

[wjbeaty]

> These are basically very complex rose colored glasses.

With how many filter layers? Are you assuming that only one layer of congo blue is being used? Three layers is the minimum. More is better (deeper IR), but then it takes longer for your eyes to adapt.

Note that this is not my instructable and not my video. The actual $10 IR goggles instructions are at http://amasci.com/amateur/irgoggl.html

[agg]

I based my calculations on 4 layers of blue and one layer of red, using transmissivity data from the Roscoe web site. I got the following transmissivities for 680, 700, 720 and 740 nm: 0.0012160 0.1291743 0.2185405 0.4813672, or 1.22E-003 1.29E-001 2.19E-001 4.81E-001

[creative zen]

what?do you just practice narrating all day or were you born with that talent?

[Omega192]

aw man, i wish i could have seen what icequeen was saying. apparently she realized she made a fool of herself, cause her account has been removed O.o back on topic. these are really cool! of course anything kipkay makes are, but still :P. im not sure where you got your filters for so cheap, i can only find sheets for 5-6 dollars :[. but i hope to make these someday, the whole idea is facinating!

[A good name]

that was amazing. only thing is that you can burn your retinas... :(

[bobyochen]

that sucks....:(

[straw hat pirate]

can u use these goggles in the night time? that would be perfect for me

[Electrolight]

While you can't see during the night with these gogles you could make a simple infared-led flashlight, that nearly invisible to the human eye, and easily see at night! Electrolight

[wjbeaty]

Please see the original "$10 infrared googles" project for complete info: http://amasci.com/amateur/irgoggl.html

They need bright sunlight to work, so no, they don't work at night

[Rocket_Robinhood]

if you were to add some sort of infared projecting flashlight to the rig, would you have jsut made some night vision goggles?

[dustin_writes]

In order to see in the dark you can combine goggles of this nature with an IR LED. The concept is basically the same as the night vision on a home video camera. Be aware that your "night vision" only sees as far as the IR LED will transmit light.

[whiteboipumas]

is it like heat vision?

[Kipkay]

No. Nothing at all like heat vision.

[The_Kangsta]

With the red lenses or blue lenses can you see a red dot from a laser pointer in sunlight?

[Pasquneille]

I can think of a lot of uses for these specially if you work in the service field and or just an ole country piddler, there is a lot of IR out there that you don't know about unless you can see it or detect it

[furcino]

LOL This is one of the best jokes I've seen in a while.

[IceBlu]

Wow theirs quite the flame war over a very simple subject here.

1) Human eye can not see in the infrared spectrum. The odd person might see a few nanometers into the IR spectrum but it would not be distinguishable from the massive amount of the visible spectrum we can see.

2) The idiots that repeatedly ask 'Will it help me see in the dark' free energy does not exist anywhere. If you cant see in the dark now put on goggles that remove even less of what you cant see would actually make it more dark. If you want night vision for $10 buy a damn flashlight.

3) A nearly perfect visible light filter that only lets IR through is an exposed but un-used photo negative. The bits at the beginning and end of your developed film, You can't see through them because YOU cant see IR.

4) The 2 failsafe tests to see if anything that claims IR vision is true, a bottle of Cola (coke/pepsi/whatever) will look clear as water, can see things on the other side like water. Or look at the end of your average TV/Stereo remote and when you press a button you see a light. (If you see a light with the nakkid eye that an LED to let the user know a button was pressed)

5) A excellent writeup on how to actually see IR is here http://www.hoagieshouse.com/IR/ and theirs lots of photos to show what the work looks like through ONLY the IR spectrum.

[Goodhart]

I agree: I picked up a pair of IR lenses from American Science n Surplus quite a few years back (over 28 years ago when I was bit younger and much more ignorant), and no amount of light I could muster could be "seen" through those lens (not from any source I had, not IR, not UV, not florescent).

[drcrash]

I think you're mistaken. (And making the same mistake I initially did)

Have you read Bill Beaty's article, or his gracious comments replying to me, below?

The claim is that there is no sharp cutoff below which the human eye is completely insensitive to IR, just a steep slope to the frequency response curve. If the IR is bright enough, and the visible light is almost entirely blocked so as not to wash it out, you can see into the near infrared range. Dimly, but you can see it.

As Bill says, the gain is just terrible, so you need very bright near IR to see it at all. And it doesn't seem like there's a practical application of this, as Icequeen says. You can't see in the dark with them (unless maybe you have an *extremely* bright IR illuminator).

That doesn't mean that it doesn't work at all, or that it isn't interesting, as a science project. It's neat if you can see IR directly with your own eyeballs.

I'm not sure if this will work in combination with an exposed-film IR filter, but I'm also not sure that'd be a fair test. If the exposed film filter blocks some very near IR as well as almost all of the visible light, it would reduce the gain in the near IR range even further.

(For this to work, and to demonstrate what Bill says it demonstrates, it is only necessary to see very near IR, so long as that is not normally-visible red. The gain gets even worse as you go deeper into the near IR range, but I don't think that Bill would claim otherwise.)

[chaosspawn]

These glasses should indeed let you see the (near) infrared spectrum. The wikipedia article on infrared states The boundary between visible and infrared light is not precisely defined. The human eye is markedly less sensitive to light above 700 nm wavelength, so shorter frequencies make insignificant contributions to scenes illuminated by common light sources. But particularly intense light (e.g., from lasers, or from bright daylight with the visible light removed by colored gels[1]) can be detected up to approximately 780 nm, and will be perceived as red light. The onset of infrared is defined (according to different standards) at various values typically between 700 nm and 800 nm. Hardly definitive scientific proof I realize, but the basic principle is there.

[chaosspawn]

link to the wikipedia article

[Goodhart]

I have to agree with a lot of what is said here. I picked up a pair of IR lenses from American Science n Surplus quite a few years back, and no amount of light I could muster could be "seen" through those lens.

[Ayce]

He never said they are night vision goggles he said: Infra-red \In`fra-red"\, a. [Infra- + red.] (Physics) Lying outside the visible spectrum at its red end; -- said of rays less refrangible than the extreme red rays. I've done the same but with sunglasses I can see using the welding goggles would work much better but at the same time makes you look a bit crazy when wearing them.

[ehrichweiss]

They definitely are NOT IR goggles that help you view the IR spectrum(as is typically implied when one uses the term "IR goggles"). They are nothing more than IR filters. You could better use the "goggles" to filter all the visible light from a light source and use the resulting light for a real set of IR goggles/camera though you'll find that those gels won't do high wattages; you'd need glass for that.

[Icequeen]

(removed by author or community request)

[endolith]

"See the title says "infrared goggles" if they were infra-red one could see in the dark with them." No. That would be "night vision goggles". You're completely missing the point. Infrared goggles let you see infrared, which is what these do.

[Icequeen]

(removed by author or community request)

[endolith]

"I dont understand why people in here are arguing science with scientist and engineers It makes no sence to me why someone would argue this with me when they have done no research to speak of."

I am an engineer. Why have you removed all your comments?

[endolith]

Sorry, but you're not getting it. Night vision goggles amplify or intensify light. There are night vision goggles that intensify infrared light, but there are also night vision goggles that intensify visible light. Think about it.

These are not night vision goggles, and nowhere are they claimed to be. They are infrared goggles. They filter out visible light, leaving only infrared, with no amplification or intensification. But by filtering out the visible, the pupils can dilate more than normal, and enable the person to see in the infrared or near-infrared which would otherwise be swamped by visible light. The eye's response to wavelengths of light is not an ideal brickwall filter. (Nothing is.)