Why we built Night Mode
A large portion of air operations in the defense sector are carried out at night. Pilots must train for takeoff, complex in-air procedures, and landing in the dark. Military and emergency personnel rehearse missions that begin before dawn or continue long after sunset. Until now, these night time, low-light conditions, have been difficult to replicate in mixed reality. Turning down the lights in a real training facility often introduces unwanted visual noise, grain, or motion artefacts in video pass-through.
The result: realism is lost, and users are not utilising the best performance headsets can provide
We wanted to change that.
How Night Mode works
Night Mode allows you to make real-world elements like cockpits and various tools appear in video passthrough as if they are being viewed at night, without actually dimming your physical environment.
The Night Mode feature applies a real-time color grading effect to the pass-through video to simulate night time lighting conditions. This effect dynamically adjusts contrast, saturation, and brightness, and adds a bluish tint to create a more realistic night-time visual experience. Importantly, the Night Mode effect is applied during the video post-processing stage, meaning it does not modify the camera’s native settings, such as exposure time. As a result, it does not interfere with computer vision algorithms, including hand tracking or marker detection, nor does it affect the camera streams accessed via the SDK API.
This means you can keep your training room or simulator bay brightly lit for safety and comfort, while the visual feed inside the headset looks convincingly like night time. And because Night Mode is processed intelligently within Varjo Base, it avoids the typical drawbacks of real low-light imaging, such as increased sensor noise or loss of detail.
Designed for realism and performance
Our goal with Night Mode wasn’t simply to “darken the view.” It was to create a repeatable lighting condition that feels like operating in night time. It enables organisations to expand training and testing conditions, reduce the logistical challenges of physical lighting setups, and deliver more consistent scenarios across sessions.
For teams developing XR-based simulation, this is one of the most requested capabilities we’ve ever added and it’s only the beginning of what’s possible as we continue to evolve the XR-4 platform.
Try Night Mode in Varjo Base 4.13
Night Mode works seamlessly with the XR-4 Series’ advanced video pass-through and high-dynamic-range color pipeline. The resulting image retains detail, texture, and clarity, even when emulating night time.
Night Mode is available now for XR-4 Series headsets in Varjo Base 4.13. You can enable it directly in the Mixed Reality settings or through the Varjo CLI (Beta). We can’t wait to see how you’ll use it to push immersive realism even further.
Fine tuning Night Mode with Varjo Alpha
Every training environment is unique. Lighting conditions, display systems, and simulation requirements can vary widely between customers. That’s where Varjo Alpha, our professional services team, comes in.
Varjo Alpha specialists can help you customize and calibrate Night Mode to match your exact operational needs, ensuring perfect visual balance between the physical and virtual worlds. Whether it’s optimizing the effect for specific cockpit lighting, display systems, or mixed-reality simulators, the Alpha team can provide end-to-end support to a perfected simulation of night time operations in your deployments.
