That’s amazing. The mice wake up after the procedure and everything looks different… :eek:
Where’s Mouse_Maven when you need her?
AND detects polarized light!
wow.
Ploughing through the links off that IR goggle page, I discovered this: http://www.maxmax.com/
This outfit sells IR and UV inks! Cameras! Filters! There are inks that fluoresce in the visible when hit by IR, and inks that fluoresce in IR when hit by visible. They’ll modify your camera to see IR, and apparently some cameras are sensitive to UV as well! For example, there’s a Sony HD camcorder that has been modified:
330 nm to around 400 nm is UV; 700 nm to 1200 nm is IR.
When are we getting that IRGBU monitor again?
Maybe I should hit the electronics stores at Matheson and Dixie and start buying multicoloured LEDs.
Chances are pretty good that your digital camera already sees IR:
Well whadda you know. The iSight camera in my Mac is IR-sensitive. When I aim the remote that came with the computer at the camera and press a button, a purplish-white dot of illumination appears on the end of the remote as shown in the iChat video preview. 
There’s some range in the near IR that’s used for remotes. I think they could be anywhere from 800 to 960 nm or so.
Note, also, that this is the near infrared, and not the thermal infrared where objects like people glow in their own radiation. You have to do things very differently to see that, and it’s more expensive.
The near infrared is also thermal infrared for things that are hot but not hot enough for us to see glowing. For example, I think a soldering iron would probably glow enough in the near IR for modified cameras to see, or maybe even plain ones.
Silicon photodetectors in general are pretty good into the near infrared, the 800’s or even 900’s I think. Since they generate so many electrons from every photons, and IR photons are less energetic, and therefore a watt of IR has more photons than does a watt of visible light, silicon photodetectors are actually more sensitive in the near IR than they are in the visible, on a signal per watt of light basis.
Obligatory link to the LED Museum. Here are reviewed LEDs of every colour, including IR and UV. Their slogan is “We put the ‘die’ back in ‘diode’.”. Heh.
Dangit, I can’t find the site to provide the link, but someone did the same thing as the guy with the infrared goggles, except with ultraviolet. He made his own goggles to filter out all but NUV and went walking around (with the other colors filtered out, you can see by UV pretty good), and made a second one for his camera and took pictures.
I would think what would be most cool would be to not filter all the other colors out but to tamp them down so as to equalize the visual input that actually gets to the retina (i.e., make up for the UV-opacity of the retina) — in other words, not to see how things look in UV but to see how things look in RGBU.
Cool! This is what I was thinking about after I read the IR-goggle page. I wonder what the filters were?
Hmm. Googling ‘UV goggles’ just brings up all kinds of pages for UV-protective goggles. Kinda the opposite of what we’re looking for. ‘UV-pass’ gives better results.
This link mentions a dark violet “Woods glass” which apparently passes UV while blocking visible light. There’s also mention of SPIE, an association devoted to the ‘study and advancement’ of light. There seem to be mentions of UV-pass filters for photography. Evidently I’m not the first person to look for this…
Here’s a lightbulb made of Woods glass which gives IR and UV only:
Yes, we used a thermal-imaging camera when I was in architecture school. Here’s one. In longwave IR (something like 10000 nm, or 10 um), people light up in the strangest places when they get embarassed. 
I’ll have to shut off the lights and aim my webcam at the electric elements on the stove…
For infrared, maybe with some plastic surgery and neural rewiring, a pit organ could be developed.
The problem would be to keep the body’s own warmth from overwhelming the pits. Snakes, naturally, don’t have this problem.
Perhaps putting the pits on antenna stalks would be the solution.
Hey! I just created an Andorian!
>The problem would be to keep the body’s own warmth from overwhelming the pits. Snakes, naturally, don’t have this problem.
I think the pits would sense thermal flux, whether it was positive or negative or neutral. You can sense radiant heat pretty well, for instance, with the back of your hand, though of course its shape and the indistinct spatial arrangement of your sensitivity don’t give you much directional sense. You don’t have to be cold to detect differences in thermal flux. Notice that people can use thermal cameras to detect things that are colder than they are, for example cold spots inside a house (the camera would be at room temperature and the window or the fireplace or whatever would be cooler than that).
And snakes aren’t cold, anyway. They are “cold blooded”, but this misleading term means they have little or no regulation of their body temperature, not that their temperature isn’t elevated. Snake blood would be somewhat warm coming out of the snake. It’s a consequence of metabolism. Whatever calories the snake is consuming just laying still are pretty much going to come out as heat.
Mentioning that problem was why I opened this thread; I’ve idly speculated about this for years. Barring cheating by using cybernetics, I’d say a better solution would be mounting the infraeyes on the inner curve of horns; thick, convoluted ones. Antenna would be too flimsy; one could set the eyes where they would be protected by the curve of horns. The horns would have a convoluted outer surface, which would both dissipate heat, and if properly arranged serve the same function as bat’s faces and ears and shape sound for use in echolocation.