Metal-Ion Mediated Modulation in Ionic Liquid for Pentachromatic Vision

Organisms with polychromatic vision harness exceptional color discrimination to simplify complex judgment tasks and accelerate information processing. Translating this capability to artificial systems remains challenging due to the lack of intrinsically selective photosensitive materials, the difficulty of flexibly integrating multiple spectral channels, and the absence of complete perception chains from detection to human-interpretable visualization. Here, we report a bioinspired pentachromatic vision system based on metal-ion-mediated ionic liquids (M-ILs). Doping of metal ions in an ionic liquid (IL) generates five photosensitive units with distinct absorptions. Weak, thermally reversible coordination enables spectrally differentiated photothermal conversion and amplified thermosensitivity, while integration with convolutional neural network (CNN)-based signal decoupling and pseudopentachromatic recoding achieves quantitative demultiplexing of composite visible-to-near-infrared signals. This complete artificial vision chain renders spectrally distinct yet visually similar stimuli human-perceivable, establishing a scalable paradigm for intuitively interpretable color analysis with applications in precision detection and environmental monitoring.