[acslam]

Well! Here's something I bet you guys will find interesting....

Take a remote control. Something like the one you have for your TV, cable box, stereo, etc. Notice the little "black window" OR "clear LED that doesn't light up" sticking out of the front of the remote control.

Now take your cellphone with camera, or, for that matter, ANY digital camera.....and look "right down the barrel" of your remote control. Make sure the camera app is open, so that what you see on the camera screen is the very front end of the remote control, pointed directly at the camera.

Now, press a button on the remote control, and watch your phone/camera screen.

If you're lucky enough to have a phone with the right type of imaging chip in it (and the vast majority of them do)......you should have noticed a bluish light on the screen of your camera that your eyes couldn't see in "real life"......This is the infrared signal the remote sends to the TV.

See where this is going?

Nightvision as a basic concept works by maximizing use of all available light. It won't actually work in pitch blackness without SOME form of "light", even if this light isn't in the spectrum that the human eye is designed to see.

So, nightvision basically does two things: 1. Take all the visible light you can gather and amplify it, and 2. expand the ability of the device to be able to use other kinds of light that human eyes cannot normally see. Hint: use infrared light.

In a nutshell, your phone, since it can probably see the infrared light.....already has a basic form of "nightvision" built into it.

Now, your task is to build simply a gigantic infrared light source, and you could basically see in total darkness.

Sidenote, for those that have a nintendo wii - the wii "sensor bar" isn't a sensor at all - it's nothing more than 6 infrared LED's blasting IR light out of it. You can see that with the cameraphone too, even easier than hunting down a remote control!

This test is also a good way to check the batteries in your remotes, or troubleshoot remote control issues in general. Plus, it totally freaks people out as a party trick when you show them!