I can, and waaaaaaaaaant.
You are thinking about far IR. Near-IR is emitted by objects at couple 100s degrees. The human-warmth-capable imagers operate at 8-12 micrometers.
The near-IR capability can be reportedly achieved by dietary change, by replacing vitamin A1 with vitamin A2. Which leads me to the hypothesis that a gene tweak is possible.
Evolution is a lazy bitch that tends to stop at good-enough, and do things the easy way. Has some nice hacks, but would work way better if helped along a little.
Didn’t know that. Could be worked around by omitting the reflective layer at the center (so boosting just the peripheral vision), or by nanostructuring the layer into prisms, or augmenting technologically (self-assembly with externally added nanoparticles?).
The self-assembly can also work with other nanoparticles. I can imagine functionalized semiconductor ones, that would go further into IR sensitivity than the purely biological systems could. Inject a suspension of those, and they get bound to the gene-engineered binding sites in or on the cells.
A problem, definitely, but “only” a technical one.
