Jakks Pacific Spy Net Ultra Vision Goggles

Pros Provides functional night vision. Records photos and videos. May encourage ninja-like behavior.

Cons Poor camera quality. May encourage ninja-like behavior. Bottom Line The Jakks Pacific Spy Net Ultra Vision Goggles are functional toy night vision goggles that we all wish we had when we were kids.

By Will Greenwald

When I was a kid, night vision goggles were $15 glasses with LED lights and green lenses. Nowadays, kids can get actual night vision goggles. The Jakks Pacific Spy Net Ultra Vision Goggles are functional infrared goggles reasonably priced at $59.99 (list). They let you see in the dark, watch people with various fun video filters, and record anything you see with a built-in camera.

Goggle Design
The Spy Net Ultra Vision Goggles are a large hunk of black plastic with a lens and two arrays of infrared LEDs on one end, two eyepieces surrounded by a rubber shield on the other end, and a series of gray, orange, and green switches on the top surrounding a black power switch and a cover for a microSD card slot. A thin strap hangs from the sides of the goggles, letting you wear them around your shoulders. The underside holds a screwed-in battery door that covers a compartment for four AA batteries.

Like real night vision goggles, the Ultra Vision Goggles use a camera sensor and LCD screens to put a picture in front of your eyes. Since these goggles are a toy, it means the image you see is very low-resolution, and because the goggles are several inches long with the relatively narrow camera on the far end, they heavily skew your perspective and it's easy to bump into things.

Plenty of Controls
A green lever on the top of the goggles switches them into night vision mode, which makes the camera extremely infrared-sensitive and puts a green filter on the picture. This isn't just a visual trick, though; the goggles are sensitive enough to let you see in complete darkness. The right array of infrared LEDs constantly illuminates (invisibly) anything close to it, and a light switch on the top turns on the left array of infrared LEDs that have a slight red glow and can illuminate with infrared objects further away. I used the goggles in a completely dark room, and I could see it clearly with the left array turned on. The red LEDs illuminate objects too much if they're close, though, and the invisible LEDs work better in certain situations.

Photos and Videos
The goggles can capture video or still pictures in VGA (640-by-480) resolution, which is enough to give kids some fun mementos of their adventures. The image quality is predictably terrible, getting very blurry at the slightest movement, or simply because the subject shifted and you forgot to adjust the focus. In this, VGA is a functional resolution, because it's just small enough to make poor details forgivable.

The Jakks Pacific Spy Net Ultra Vision Goggles land on the ever-expanding list of toys that would have been awesome to have when I was a kid. They're a bit pricey (about as much as a PlayStation 3 game), and they might encourage your children to ambush you in the dark, but the goggles are incredibly entertaining for what, just a decade ago, would have consisted of just green lenses and a flashlight.

View the original article here