When you think of night vision goggles your mind immediately runs (alas) to the greenish images of soldiers in combat: current technology cannot capture enough light to produce images and colors that can be perceived by the brain with ease. Today things have changed, and two new technologies will revolutionize our way of seeing in the dark by introducing colors.
The first solution is from the SPI Corporation with its video camera Osprey X27: the video you find here, shot at midnight, shows amazing images: it is really difficult to believe that it was not shot during the day, but the coexistence of the stars in the sky leaves you speechless and escape any doubt.
The technology behind these viewers works by transforming photons into electrons that an artificial intelligence algorithm encodes in visible colors: the lighting factor also contributes to the clear vision, which leads an object to acquire up to 85.000 times its brightness.
Then there is an intermediate way represented by ColorTAC CVA-14: the unit is currently being used by the US military and works with a mechanism similar to that of the old visors (to adapt to a monocular vision to be integrated into a helmet) with a compression factor that allows you to encode the images returning colors close enough to the real ones.
However, both systems require a minimum source of light to operate (as indeed the current ones) and are not able to move in total, complete darkness: in the future they will be able to incorporate thermal vision systems and hyperspectral vision systems to capture other details and return even more detailed images using less light.
