The Army's New Night-Vision Goggles Look Like Technology Stolen From Aliens

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When you think of night-vision goggles, you probably imagine the pitch black of night being illuminated in a sea of green that helps improve visibility. That’s ancient technology now as the US Army’s Lancer Brigade of Joint Base Lewis–McChord demonstrates what soldiers see through the military’s latest and greatest night vision goggles. The Predator would be jealous.

Known as the Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binocular—or ENVG-B, for short—the new goggles were designed to vastly improve a soldier’s ability to not only see what is going on all around them under any lighting conditions but to also be able to accurately discern what they’re seeing. That was the biggest problem with traditional night vision goggles. The old ones worked by converting the photons gathered in low-light light settings into electrons that were amplified as they passed through a vacuum tube and eventually lit up a phosphor-coated screen that provided a brighter image of what the goggles were seeing.

The traditional green color of night vision technology was chosen because it was considered to be the easiest color to look at for prolonged periods in the dark. But the brightened images lacked contrast and were often very noisy, which made it difficult for a user to understand what they were really seeing. For soldiers in combat, that can be especially problematic.