When will we have X-ray glasses like in James Bond?

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How close are we?

Looking through clothing with devices that emit electromagnetic radiation is already possible, just think of the security at the airport. There goes a bag like that, hops, on the conveyor belt and through a scanner to see if there’s anything crazy or dangerous in it. Sometimes you also step into a scanner yourself – arms up, please! – who can indeed look under your clothing to see if you are hiding a weapon.

Yes: that sometimes happens with X-rays, similar to how a doctor shoots a picture of a bone fracture. Sometimes this also happens with slightly different frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. Such devices are then called millimeter scanners, but the underlying principle remains more or less the same: one beam shoots through the body, while another is absorbed or reflected, so that you can see that there is something different there than ‘transparent’ for that radiation. things like skin, blood, organs, or clothing.

Only you are talking about expensive, cumbersome devices. Not about hip glasses that you quickly put on your head à la James Bond to cheat whether that broad guy at the bar hides a knife or pistol under his jacket.

Still: more portable variants also exist. They then fit in a suitcase, for example. Or take the Mini Z, roughly the size of a portable video camera, which you can use to look inside suspicious, abandoned packages, among other things. At least that late a computer game-like demo see on the manufacturer’s website. Unfortunately, you still can’t exactly put the device on your nose.

Logically. If you want to look into X-rays, you need something that generates enough energy to also emit that X-ray, so that you can ‘scan’ an object. In addition, you need detectors that subsequently capture and analyze such radiation. All that technology in a single pair of glasses? That’s quite a challenge to say the least.

But, wait, couldn’t you buy toy X-ray glasses before? Those variants with cardboard ‘glasses’ with a print of a spiral and small holes in it? They were especially popular in the United States, where they were called X-Ray Spex. And no: of course they couldn’t really produce X-rays. Instead, the holes (sometimes with tiny bird feathers behind them) caused what your eyes saw to shift slightly. In the places where the images overlapped, the image was then darker. Look at a hand that way and it looks a bit like you suddenly see bones.

But real X-ray glasses that, like James, allow you to spy on your enemies – and attractive specimens of the human species, because Bond is a scoundrel – under their clothes? No, there is no such thing yet. Good thing too, because otherwise it would be banned immediately for privacy reasons.

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