Do DIY IR Goggles work?

A month or two ago I had a guest post on how to make night vision IR goggles. It was an interesting article, but after trying it for myself I found it wasn’t working as expected. It turns out that while the goggles do help you see Near Infrared light, it doesn’t help you see the IR spectrum and therefore is useless for making your own night vision goggles. I decided to explain it with a video, but here’s the rundown.

The IR spectrum is mostly invisible to the naked eye. What you can see is what’s called NEAR Infrared. It’s only a very small amount of the IR spectrum. The Goggles with blue and red screens only filter out anything that is not Near Infrared. What’s left is a very small amount of light the NIR or Near Infrared range. The goggles don’t do what IR night vision goggles do: Transform the invisible IR spectrum into visible light. For that you need technology.

All IR vision technology processes the IR light and translates it into an equivalent Visible light spectrum. If you’ve watched the night shots on the BBC Planet Earth series or watched any night shots on TV you’ve seen this. Many camcorders (those with night vision) already transform some IR light into the visible spectrum (see video for example), but they’re not purpose built so don’t do as good of a job. It does show you what you would need to do to make it work.

To do real IR goggles, you’d need an IR light source to amplify this invisible IR spectrum and a way to convert IR light into visible light. In the end though, if you’re trying to sneak around with an IR flashlight you’d be seen by anyone with real night vision goggles.

This is one of those DIYs that would need a lot of resources and understanding of optics. Or you can just go out and drop the cash on a proper set of Night vision goggles that already have everything you need!