seeing the invisible (infrared wavelength)

The other day I was trying to figure out if I could actually find a way to "see" the invisible spectrum. Wouldn't that be cool? What would Infrared and other low or high-end spectrum reveal to us? Would we see whole new worlds around us that we did not see before? What would the newly mapped world look like?

Curiosity got the best of me. I started searching. Googling let me know that there are creatures like Bats, Snakes that see life with different eyes. Some sites even mapped what these creatures see. Some images were colorless to indicate how a particular animal is virtually color blind (apparently, Dogs can not see much color). Few images were packed with great color (apparently, the bee has great color sensitivity). The owl is yet another visually gifted creature.

Reading on the eye and evolution of the eye I found Lipids and the story of the eye in Gregory's book "the eye and the brain"

With respect to cameras and detectors of the invisible light, my original quest, I found the topic of Infrared or IR LEDs. Apparently, we have these IR devices everywhere. I read that virtually all of our remote controllers have them; be it a TV remote or a radio-controlled car, all seem to be using this IR technology. In fact, I even noticed that an eye-detector instrument uses them.

If you think that our remote controls are an unexpected source for IR lights, then brace yourself because even the detectors for these IR exist in an equally unlikely source: our digital cameras!

I found that our digital cameras are excellent at detecting invisible infrared lights. In fact, I googled and found night vision cameras being built out of this technology. Inspired by this idea I am hacking my personal webcam to build my very own IR detecting sensor. I also bought a WiiRemote for this very same purpose.

In my opinion, another cool invisible-light detector is the cell phone. Do you not agree? I call it a detector because it has got a radio that picks up certain wavelenths that are invisible to the human eye. Like our biological eyes, it too has its own constructs that it builds out of its stimulus. So, isn't it an eye as well?

I feel that a normal cell phone can be a great way to read and record wavelengths which are undetectable to human eye. At Nokia I recall using the cell to detect all the broadcasted signals at particular assigned spectral frequencies. In this cog sci class I am discovering that this cell phone, in that sense, is like a eye for those wavelengths. Wouldn't it be cool to plot out in Cartesian coordinates the view detected by the cell phone?

With IR, I discovered that we could see a larger world than my eye could reveal. IR allows us to see in darkness. It allows us to see through plastic and is blocked by glass. If such is the revelation of IR, what then will the GSM and CDMA detecting phone receiver of our cell phone reveal? Again, what would all the reports of the various received signal of a cell phone reveal to us about the world around us?

I wonder if anybody built a phone-camera of the type I describe above?? Why wonder... why not I go google... off I go.

Sai Gollapudi