Comment Re:Utterly misleading post. (Score 1) 99
If you place it in front of the eye lens - contact lenses count - then you need the output visible light to be going in the same direction as the input IR light.
There are no common physical processes that can do this.
Frequency-doubling crystals do this - combining two photons going in the same direction into one of twice the frequency. (That's how some green laser diodes work - bumping up infrared.) Not practical for a sensor, since you need a LOT of infrared that's IN PHASE to pull this off.
I, too, had seen the "contact lens" claim and read TFA to see if they had found some stimulated-emission phenomenon (say, one where they pumped the graphine to an excited state and got infrared photons to trigger the emission of a visible photon moving the same way). So I was very disappointed to find it was a FET with the gate stimulated by a graphene infrared-to-E-field transducer, suitable for a retina but not to convert flying photons.
Infrared is too long a wavelength for something like paving a contact lens with a fly's eye of micro-camera-display converters. So I don't see infra-vision contact lenses coming out of THIS breakthrough. Maybe a google-glass analog, or a two-way variant of the Israeli regular-glasses heads-up display with the imbedded refractive-index-change partial mirror that projects the little display near the hinge as if it were a screen in front of you at infinity or task-distance.