Jane Edwards
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has announced the selection of 10 university and industry research teams for a program that seeks to develop lightweight, night vision goggles that could offer wider field of view and improved visual access across infrared bands using advances in transduction materials and planar optics.
The Enhanced Night Vision in Eyeglass Form program has two technical areas and Physical Sciences, the research center of Raytheon Technologies, SRI International, University of California in San Diego and the University of Washington were the teams selected to work on the first technical area, DARPA said Wednesday.
“The teams in the first technical area are developing technologies that could drastically reduce the bulk and volume of objective, intensifier, and eyepiece of a night vision system,” said Rohith Chandrasekar, ENVision program manager at DARPA’s defense sciences office.
Raytheon BBN, Stanford University, University of Central Florida, University of Melbourne and the University of Pennsylvania will work on the ENVision program’s second technical area.
“Teams in the second technical area are exploring ways to directly upconvert and amplify light from the infrared to the visible using new materials and up-conversion processes. These efforts could potentially lead to all-optical night vision systems in the future without the need for image intensifiers,” noted Chandrasekar.
