Imagine seeing colours in the infrared, or gaining night vision simply by putting on a pair of glasses.

Humans can see in a tiny bandwidth of the light spectrum: infrared, ultraviolet, and x-rays are invisible to us.

Night-vision goggles have helped us peer into the infrared and see light emitted from bodies, animals, objects in the form of heat or thermal radiation.

But those goggles are clunky. They take photons, light particles, convert them to electricity, then beam them into your eyes as photons again.