All this and more could be possible in the future thanks to a new development by researchers in the US using graphene lenses to sense “the full infrared spectrum” plus visible and ultraviolet light.

“We can make the entire design super-thin,” said Zhaohui Zhong, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan. “It can be stacked on a contact lens or integrated with a cell phone.”

Current night vision technology needs bulky cooling equipment to stop the detectors getting confused by their own heat radiation, but the graphene-based models can do the same job using just a few layers of the atom-thick material.