Genarro: “Are they heavy?”
Excited Kid: “Yeah!”
Genarro: “Then they’re expensive, put them back”
Excited Kid: [nope]
The Night Vision Goggles are large binoculars that are sized to fit on an adult head. They are stored in a padded case in the Tour Jeep’s trunk. When activated, a single red light illuminated in the “forehead” of the device, and four green lights appear on the rim of each lens. The green lights rotate around the lens as the user zooms the binoculars in and out. On a styling point, the goggles are painted in a very traditional and very adorable green and yellow striped dinosaur pattern.
Tim holds the goggles up as he plays with them, and it looks like they are too large for his head (although we don’t see him adjust the head support at all, so he might not have known they were adjustable). He adjusts the zoom using two hidden controls—one on each side. It isn’t obvious how these work. It could be that…
- There are no controls, and it automatically focuses on the thing in the center of the view or on the thing moving.
- One side zooms in, and the other zooms out.
- Both controls have a zoom in/zoom out ability.
- Each side control powers its own lens.
- Admittedly, the last option is the least likely.
Unfortunately the movie just doesn’t give us enough information, leaving it as an exercise for us to consider.
Dr. Grant, Timmy is hogging the tech
Note that there aren’t enough goggles in the Jeep for everyone. During a tour this might set up a competition for the goggles. Considering how much a ticket to the island is implied to cost, the passengers in the Jeep would likely be unhappy at this constraint.
Better here would be some kind of HUD for the entire Jeep, with a thermal overlay or night-vision projection of what’s around the Jeep.
Alternatively, if cost is indeed an issue to Hammond, the TV screen could be used to show camera feeds of the pen and dinosaurs inside.
Hopefully A Prototype
The lights on the front show what’s happening internally, and give feedback that the goggles are doing something to people watching. As we learn soon after this scene, dinosaurs are also very sensitive to light and motion. Especially the T-Rex.
These night vision goggles would work best in darkness, where it would add to the tour to see a dinosaur behaving (relatively) naturally. If the dinosaurs on the tour are very sensitive to light, then the motion on the front of the goggles would actually be counter to the goals person using the goggles.
So let’s presume these were a prototype, and why they were in the trunk and not mentioned by Hammond at the start of the tour.
Overall
The goggles look easy to use, but appear to need refinement from field experience. A key point will be how the passengers react to having enough of them, and whether they serve the tourists in experiencing the park as intended.
If you watch the scene carefully, you can see that he presses (his) left button to turn the googles on, with a small clockwise rotation. The subsequent right press, held down, causes them to continuously zoom/rotate clockwise, then strangely it seems to respond to a single momentary toggle of the same right hand button, with reversing the continous direction of rotation to anticlockwise. You can also see that the entire front lens body rotates including the ring itself, not just the light underneath (unlike some modern replica props which used multiple stepped fixed LEDs). If you look at Youtube videos of the real prop in a museum, it is actually quite crude. The rings seem to be just clear plastic/resin with 4 embedded standard green LEDs, and the yellow body looks like a simple vacuum molding with the edges cut by hand.