Is it possible to see in infrared and regular visible light at the same time?

Pit Vipers in particular seem to have an integrated heat vision - see this article. Note from the above:

Some neurons appear to be tuned to detect movement in one direction. It has been found that the snake’s visual and infrared maps of the world are overlaid in the optic tectum. This combined information is relayed via the tectum to the forebrain.

IR is hard because has a very high absorbance for the IR spectrum, so even if you had IR receptors, an eyeball full of mostly water is going to be opaque to it. IIRC, the only creatures with any sort of infravision are insects and pit vipers, the pit vipers having literal “pits” in their heads lined with IR-sensitive cells so the IR only passes through air. Never been clear how the insect compound eye even works.

The IR sensor on a FLIR is cooled to something like 70 K in order to be able to sufficiently detect heat energy. Not really a workable technique for a biological system.

The king of colour vision is of course the mantis shrimp, which can see much of the IR and UV spectrum, visible light and can differentiate various kinds of polarised light (link)


Of course, we can’t say what a mantis shrimp’s vision actually looks like, from its POV.

In fact, I can never be sure even that you and I perceive colour the same way. How the brain generates the perception of colour, and how we could ever describe colour objectively is considered a significant, maybe even unsolvable, problem.