X-Ray Vision

Neat, my bones! ...Are those tumors?

Pete: So you're telling me you never once looked in the girls' locker room?
Clark: Well, maybe once.

— Smallville

A power that lets one see through almost anything. It can usually be turned on or off at will, and the objects that you can see through and how far you see through them vary.

How the power actually works, especially if it's implied to be actual X-rays, is confusing. Whether your eyes or your glasses are sensitive to X-rays, you would still need a powerful X-ray source on the other side of whatever you were trying to see through, and even then you'd only see things that were X-ray opaque. Presumably you'd "see" things thus revealed in a "colour" for which we normal, X-ray-blind people have no name.

X-ray scopes, goggles, visors and what-have-you are perennially popular items in video games. Sometimes this has unintentionally humorous effects, as when some characters repel-everything super armor turns out to be completely radiotransparent, allowing you to see his/her skeleton beneath.

In the real world, there is a technology called "X-ray backscatter imaging" which allows for a certain amount of selective viewing. However, it requires bulky beamshaping equipment around an X-ray tube, which is of considerable size, not counting the high-voltage power supply and water-cooling system to keep from melting the tube's cathode. And then you have to scan the beam across the target, and use large and heavy detectors to pick up the extremely faint backscattered X-rays. The smallest mobile X-ray backscatter (not counting "portal"-style backscatter machines, which can cheat in a number of ways) machine is built into a 20-foot shipping container. It isn't impossible to miniaturize a backscatter machine, but it would take a whole lot of really surprising breakthroughs in a whole lot of scientific fields.

Also, all those X-rays would kill most people due to all the exposure to that much radiation. Given this, the common usage of X-ray vision for voyeuristic purposes has even worse implications than invasion of privacy—it's downright dangerous to the people who are being ogled. (Logically, X-ray vision wouldn't even stop with exposing naked bodies—it goes straight to the bones, as anyone who's had X-ray scans in hospitals or airports knows—so using it to see through clothes wouldn't really help much as skin and other soft parts (like organs) wouldn't show up very well either.)

See also: Super-Senses. Similar to Vein-o-Vision and Volcanic Veins. See-Thru Specs, despite the name, is about eyewear that let you see things on a cosmically different level. Not to be confused with X-Ray Sparks.

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Examples

Advertising

• Superman vs. Nick O'Teen: Superman mentions this classic power of his in the first TV ad, claiming that with it, he can see "the harm that cigarettes do inside people's bodies."

Anime and Manga

• In Akame ga Kill!, the Ax-Crazy Serial Killer Zank the Beheader has a Teigu that grants him several vision powers, including X-Ray Vision. He uses it to see Akame in her underwear while fighting her, but he only comments that she doesn't have any concealed weapons. After he is killed, Tatsumi gets his hands on the Teigu. He briefly sees all the girls in their underwear before the Teigu rejects him.
• In A Certain Scientific Railgun, Mii Konori has this ability. She usually uses it to scan her opponents for concealed weapons.
• Chained Soldier: When the clairvoyant Nei donates her power to Yuuki, it enhances his senses. He is shocked to see all the girls in their underwear. He accidentally ups the intensity and sees all the girls naked, making him flip out until the enhancement wears off.
• In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, powerful Demon Slayers can awaken the power to see the "Transparent World", allowing them to view the body's internal makeup and use it in battle to anticipate enemies' movements and attacks.
• Doraemon: Some Doraemon's gadget have this functionality. For example, the "Xyz Light Camera" can be used to see the contents of objects, similarly to an x-ray.
• EDENS ZERO: While poking through Professor Weisz's things, Shiki finds a pair of X-Ray goggles. Wearing them lets him see Happy's robotic parts, Rebecca naked, and an attacker hiding on another floor. He them promptly forgets he is wearing them and makes fun of the attacker for being naked, confusing him, before Rebecca finally gets them off him.
• In High School D×D, when Issei gains an ability called "Penetrate", which is normally used to allow his attacks to pierce any barrier, he promptly applies it to his own eyes so he can look through girls' shirts.
• Kogarashi's "Maid Guy Scan" ability in Kamen no Maid Guy. He does use it to see through girls' clothes, but only with good intentions...such as telling his master, Naeka, that she needs to lose some weight. Nobody really likes it when he does this. Particularly because the ONLY people he really uses this is on women.
• An episode of Lupin III: Part II has a woman named Nova and a scientist invent a special eye drops that let the user see through any surface with complete clarity. Nova gives it to Zenigata; he and his policeman discover also the potential of the invention on Nova herself and Fujiko later.
• Naruto:
  • Hyuga family members with the Byakugan power have general all-purpose vision, including the ability to see people through objects. Used mostly to see chakra lines, it's also been shown to allow vision of a person's skeletal structure, and fans have speculated that it might have... other advantages (and disadvantages).
  • The Byakugan's Power Perversion Potential is at least verified in Naruto the Movie: Road to Ninja, where the alternate universe's version of Neji tries to peek into the girls' bath using his Byakugan.
• Natsume from Night Raid 1931 mostly uses his ability to scout or see through rooms in spy missions. The power and distance is affected by moon phases — it is at its weakest in the new moon.
• Viola from One Piece. She ate the Giro Giro no Mi (Glare-Glare Fruit), which allows her to not only see through peoples' clothes and skin, but into their minds, as well. She also can see things from all the way across an entire island as well as being able turn her tears into large, hot iron whales to attack her opponents (because of a pun in Japanese).
• Rebuild World: One of the many Augmented Reality effects Alpha provides to Akira as Mission Control via his wireless Brain/Computer Interface lets him see through walls. The KIRYO system Sheryl's gang eventually gets, which is like a weaker version of Alpha's support, also provides this benefit through goggles. Some high level Powered Armor have countermeasures to block this alongside obscuring the wearer’s face from other’s Everything Sensor.
• To Love Ru:
  • One chapter has Rito put on a special pair of glasses that Lala uses to work on her inventions. As this is ecchi, we get to see "Rito Vision" of various girls in their lingerie. At one point, he accidentally adjusts the intensity, which renders them totally nude after that. He also gets some fan disservice, because those glasses allow to see through male clothing as well. Near the end, Rito somehow ended up under Run's groin, and she sneezes and transforms into Ren in which Rito commented 'has become something much worse' and he passed out.
  • Again in an extra chapter of sequel "Darkness". Thanks to one of Momo's plants, Rito becomes a pervert and grabs the glasses which allows him to see through clothes of many girls until he is stopped by Momo.
• When Shiki in Tsukihime concentrates in the right way, he can see through things like skin in order to 'kill' tainted blood as it moves through his veins. Doing this too hard leaves him almost entirely blind for a period, during which all he can see are lines and points of death.

Comic Books

• Proto-Superhero Olga Mesmer, The Girl with the X-Ray Eyes, appeared in a pulp magazine comic strip from 1937-1938. Although lacking a secret identity, she had Super Strength as well as X-ray vision, so is sometimes considered a precursor to Superman.
• Superman:
  • Superman looks at a wall and sees Lois, in natural colour, tied up behind it. Or he sees a bomb inside a ship that he's swimming past. Apparently, his eyes emit something that goes right through masonry or steel, but bounces off skin, clothing, dynamite, etc. at wavelengths that look just like ordinary light. However, like real X-rays, it's stopped by sufficiently dense materials (although, Pre-Crisis, only lead stopped it).
  • Kryptonian X-Ray Vision has been handwaved in in many different ways: it is actually a combination of his telescopic vision and microscopic vision, he sees a completely different wavelength of light, it's actually a psionic power, he can detect the minor electromagnetic energy emitted when cosmic ray particles pass through matter... However, in The Golden Age of Comic Books and at least part of The Silver Age of Comic Books, it was definitely X-rays. In fact, this is where his heat vision originally came from; he was able to focus the X-rays enough to cook whatever he was looking at. Or in one Superboy comic, turn gold into lead. One odd side-effect of this was that, until the Post-Crisis reboot, his heat vision couldn't melt lead. (This ignores the fact that an actual beam of highly focused X-rays could in fact melt lead, if it were sufficiently intense.)
  • Superman's Service to Servicemen is a Golden Age Superman work that briefly played with the "realism" of X-ray vision: the reason why he wasn't an active participant in World War II? Clark Kent was rejected during the recruitment physical due to being "blind as a bat", which he realized was because he was accidentally using his X-ray vision to look through the eye chart and was reading an entirely different one in the other room.
  • Superman: Secret Identity is a Reconstruction or one extended This Is Reality take on Superman, and it approaches this power the same way: he only uses it on humans when he really, really needs to, because while he doesn't know exactly how it works, he's aware that blasting people with X-rays would be very bad for them.
  • In Krypton No More, Superman uses his X-Ray vision to scan an enemy and figure out a way to beat him. Later on, his X-Ray vision warns him that he mustn't fly in his apartment through a window because Lois Lane is inside.
  • In Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man, Superman uses it to scan Lex Luthor's machines and to anticipate co-worker Steve Lombard's pranks.
  • In The Supergirl From Krypton (1959), Supergirl practices her X-Ray vision, focusing the X-rays enough to generate heat and fix her bedroom's cracked mirror, and later watching through the walls of the Midvale's orphanage.
  • In a hilarious scene of Superman: Brainiac, Supergirl meets Cat Grant and accidentally reveals that her boobs are fake when she naively says out loud that "My X-ray vision is picking up some weird plastics in your —"
  • In the first scene of Supergirl Vol. 1 #1, Supergirl uses her X-Ray vision to see through several walls and an envelope and read a letter.
  • In Last Daughter of Krypton, her X-Rays first activate when she's fighting Superman. Having no idea what her powers are, she freaks out when she sees her own bones◊.
  • Demon Spawn: Supergirl checks that two of her co-workers weren't seriously hurt during villain Nightflame's initial attack using her X-Ray vision.
  • In Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade, she accidentally sees through the clothes of a bunch of pressmen. Not wanting seeing their underwear, she cries.
  • In Bizarrogirl, Kara uses her X-Ray vision to scan Gangbuster's hand, previously crushed by Bizarrogirl. Later she scans a big critter spawned by the godship to determine its bizarre alien physiology.
    Supergirl: A quick scan with X-Ray vision reveals this thing doesn't even have a brain. It's operating on instinct only. An eating machine.
  • Bizarrogirl herself, weirdly, has "encase things in lead"-vision, which is apparently the "opposite" of x-ray vision.
  • Ultra Boy of the Legion of Super-Heroes originally had this as his only power, but was later upgraded to "Any of Superman's powers, but only one at a time". Originally the wrinkle was that he could melt lead, unlike Superboy (see above), which humorously led some writers to have him do nothing but melt lead just to drive the point home.
• Martian Manhunter has "Martian Vision" which works like this Depending on the Writer
• British juvenile comic character X-Ray Specs in Monster Fun and Buster sometimes sees other people as skeletons, sometimes not. Sometimes he sees the crucial thing at the right time, sometimes not. Ray's specs had an interesting power if he looked through the front of the lenses: he could then see, for example, a skeleton as it looked when it was alive. In other words, a sort of reverse x-ray.
• Hitman (1993): Tommy Monaghan tried out for the Justice League of America once and was rejected. He said that he hadn't expected to get in, he just wanted to get a look at Wonder Woman with his X-Ray Vision. He left with a leer.
• Empowered's supersuit has "imaging functions" which, among other things, grants her this power. It's detailed enough to detect an aneurysm in the head of the Punch-Clock Villain who was guarding her, which saves his life.
• One character in Target Comics, the White Streak, had x-ray vision.
• An extremely disturbing use in Supreme Power where Mark Milton goes to a strip club, takes a woman home, and has sex with her - while having his x-ray vision on enough to see her bones and muscles beneath the skin. Mark also used to use it to spy on girls in high school.
• A pair of x-ray-specs is the first of his parents' gadgets that Chase finds in Runaways. Naturally, he realizes what they do by seeing Nico and Karolina in their underwear.
  What is it, Chase?
  What do those things do?
  Nothing. Nothing at all.
• The protagonist of Strontium Dog is able to emit α particles from his eyes, which somehow allows him to see through walls and metal.
  • α particles are helium nuclei and can be stopped by paper.
• In Superboy and the Ravers it's revealed that two of D.C. Force's family members have a variation of x-ray vision. One of them is a surgeon and the power comes in handy when trying to patch up metahumans with strange alterations of the regular human physique.
• Vartox, as the Always Someone Better to Superman, has x-ray vision that can see through lead.
• Wonder Woman (1942): The Earth Two bank robber Pat Pending uses a pair of x-ray goggles in his heists to aid in gettting into vaults.

Fan Works

• Last Child of Krypton: Shinji has X-ray vision thanks to his Kryptonian DNA. He has to remind himself to NOT look at Asuka's room when she's changing clothes lest he sees through the walls accidentally.
• Superwomen of Eva 2: Lone Heir of Krypton: Asuka has X-ray vision due to being half-Kryptonian. She discovers this power when she accidentally looks through several walls... and sees Shinji half-naked. Cue blushing.
• In Power Girl fic A Force of Four, Kara uses her x-ray vision fairly often to scan her surroundings looking for missing allies, enemies or weapons.
  Kara Zor-L stepped in, her footsteps echoing within the enclosed space. She began to use her X-ray vision on the structure, peering within its walls to see if she could detect the glowing, green, deadly mineral, or an enclosure of lead which would block her vision and probably indicate Kryptonite's presence.
• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Supergirl crossover The Vampire of Steel, Linda gets her first hint that Buffy Summers isn't a normal girl when she scans her handbag and sees her full anti-vampire weaponry.
  But she felt it was time to breach etiquette and turn her X-ray vision on Buffy’s valise. Linda gave it a casual glance.
  She couldn’t stop her eyes from widening when she did.
  Buffy caught it. "Something wrong, Linda?"
  Linda Danvers struggled to maintain her composure. "Oh, nothing. Nothing, Buffy. Just must’ve been some indigestion from dinner. You sure that you want me to leave you?"
  [...]
  "You, too." Linda went to the elevator and got in. She’d have to make a show of things, but there was no way she was leaving the area. Super-vision could help her keep track of Buffy Summers, even 108 stories up, even through stone and steel.
  Anybody who carried wooden stakes, silver crucifixes, garlic, and a fifth of unusual water in her valise wasn’t an Outfit bagwoman. But she’d still bear watching.
• In Superman fanfic Superman of 2499: The Great Confrontation, the main characters have this power, being of Kryptonian descent. Sometimes they find it inconvenient, though.
  Stepping into the Common Room, Katherine spied no one. An ominous sign, she thought, but stilled her unease quickly. There was enough to fret over without inventing things, that was certain. She thought to peer about with her x-ray vision, but then reconsidered. More than once, as a young girl learning to use her burgeoning powers, she had found the results of such uninvited intrusion to be—well—highly embarrassing. One of the things that she and her invalid brother Zor could still yet smile and joke about was her inadvertent pubescent sight of his first urgent, fumbling kiss with an equally awkward partner. He kept bumping Marisa's nose and she kept giggling.
• In Superman and Man, Chris tries to figure out how to use his X-Ray vision.
  How did one use x-ray vision? Did you have to squint, or call out a secret word mentally?
  Almost at the thought of it, he began seeing steel girders in frameworks, people in the rooms in front of him at various activities, a maid vacuuming a rug.
• Pony POV Series:
  • Prince Blueblood has mastered this spell. He mainly uses it to navigate tunnels and check who is knocking on his door. Yes, he has also used it to peep on girls.
  • Shining Armor briefly mentions Blueblood taught him this spell. Since he hasn't mastered it, he doesn't use it very often because it disturbs him to see bones and organs.
• In Dungeon Keeper Ami, the titular character having this power is the stated reason most of the Underworld wears leather clothing. Whether or not this is actually the case, or just an easy excuse to sell such clothing is left up to the readers to decide.
• In Hellsister Trilogy, the main character has this power. Other X-Ray Vision users include Superman and Dev-Em, another Kryptonian.
  Before she got in, she walked barefoot into her bedroom, where a framed photo of the Danverses reposed on a bedside table.
  She used her X-ray vision to see the picture of Zor-El and Allura behind it.
• A New World, A New Way: As a Luxray, Seth has the power to see through solid objects.
• Bart Allen from The Future Flash is half-Kryptonian, and X-Ray Vision is one of his many powers.
• Some kinky Fan Art for Den-noh Coil tends to reverse this, using the city's augmented reality glasses to cover some streaking girls — that is, the girls are using augmented reality to make them look like they're wearing clothing to anyone wearing the AR glasses (i.e., everyone), when in reality they're, er, not. This means that to see "through" clothing, you have to take the glasses off.

Films — Animated

• In Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, Toyman mentions an offscreen incident:
  Hey, did you guys see Power Girl when you came in? When you see her again, tell her I said sorry about the X-Ray goggles.... (he puts on a pair of now-broken goggles)

Films — Live-Action

• DC Extended Universe: Kryptonians gain tremendous powers upon being exposed to a yellow sun such as on Earth, including this one. Though it also gives them Sensory Overload at first combined with Super-Hearing.
  • Man of Steel: It's quite a traumatising experience for the young Krypton-born Clark Kent to see his comrades and teacher as skeletons coated with organs and flesh at first. It takes him several years to harness his senses, and only mere minutes to General Zod due to his warrior training.
  • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: In the Ultimate Edition, Clark/Superman couldn't see the bomb hidden in a wheelchair that killed everyone at the Senate hearing because it was coated in lead — he can't see through lead.
  • Justice League / Zack Snyder's Justice League: Superman sees Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Flash and Cyborg as skeletons coated in flesh upon being resurrected (or just the skull in Cyborg's case).
• James Bond gets a pair of X-ray glasses in The World Is Not Enough. He uses them in a casino both to see who is armed and to check out the underwear of the lovely ladies present.
• RoboCop (1987) has a thermal scanner built into him that allows him to see through walls and identify targets. He only uses it in one scene, though.
• In When Evil Calls, Michael impulsively wishes for x-ray vision (the text granting him his wish arrives while he is ogling the girls basketball team during a particularly spirited training session). His wish is granted but, like every other wish in the film. it turns out to be a case of Be Careful What You Wish For.
• The movie X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. The main character takes eyedrops to increase the frequencies of light that he can see; he goes from seeing everyone with no clothes on, to seeing their organs to seeing skeletons... Until finally seeing a monster at the center of their universe! He attempts to stop it by gouging his own eyes out, and a popular Urban Legend says that in the original cut, this didn't work and he could still see (according to Roger Corman himself, the "I CAN STILL SEE!" Wham Line never existed in any version and is an example of the Mandela Effect, but he also wishes he had thought of it).
• In xXx, Xander has a pair of X-ray binoculars with a built-in digital camera which can see through anything from clothes to brick walls, depending on what the viewer focuses on.
• Jokingly used by the title character in Pee-wee's Big Adventure. While fooling around in Mario's Magic Shop, Pee-wee dons a set of novelty X-Ray glasses and pretends to ogle a female customer, capping it off with an approving thumbs up. The customer only responds with a look of vague annoyance.

Jokes

• Parodied in a Limerick:
  An eager inventor named Jones
  Was reduced to loud sobbing and moans.
  He’d devised X-ray glasses
  To study clothed lasses,
  But all he could see was their bones.
  

Literature

• In the Alterien series, Oberon discovered early on his ability to see through solid objects. There are no x-rays involved in an Alterien's ability to see through people and walls. Oberon calls it 3D sight.
• The high spirits of Astral Dawn can see in a manner similar to x-ray vision. The high spirits don't see with physical eyes, but with their minds. This gives them the ability to perceive the world in many ways mortals cannot, including seeing through walls simply by imagining they aren't there.
• The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson. Young Bill recounts how Superman's x-ray vision isn't an actual x-ray, more of cross section, and how even that was useless for looking through women's clothing as breasts would be restrained by bras and other articles of clothing. Therefore Bill developed "Thundervision" which was able to loosen restrictive clothing while looking through it.
• In the Lensman series of classic space opera, several extraterrestrial races (and all entities of sufficient mental development) have something called just the "sense of perception", apparently the author's take on the ultimate implications of Rhine's roughly contemporary ESP experiments. SoP penetrates anything except thought-shields, to any depth the perceiver chooses to focus on, can take in detail down to the molecular level, and has range limited only by the mental capacity of the user. The Arisians, the Elder Race and ultimate mentalists of this background, routinely use their sense of perception to observe objects in other galaxies.
• Ari Bach's Valhalla features a doctor with X-Ray eye implants.
• In Harry Potter, Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody's Glass Eye has this property.
• How to Be a Superhero states that using x-ray vision for voyeuristic purposes is only feasible if you find internal organs attractive.

Live-Action TV

• Played for Laughs in I Dream of Jeannie. Jeannie accidentally gives Tony X-Ray vision while trying to improve his eyesight in "My Wide-Eyed Master".
• Smallville manages to use this properly. More or less. Clark's vision is indeed similar to X-rays, barring a few occasions involving girls' locker rooms which are mostly played for laughs. The lack of any kind of contrast invalidates it slightly, but it still makes more sense than the classic comic-book version.
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "The Leprechaun-Artist", after he and his friends J.P. and Richie capture a Leprechaun named Shawn McGool, Buddy wishes for X-Ray vision so that he can see through girls' clothes. His power starts working the next morning and he is initially able to see under his female classmates' clothes to their underwear. However, after a few seconds of concentrating on one girl, he sees her internal organs and faints in shock. When J.P. and Richie come to his aid, he can see their skulls. McGool, who brands Buddy a "little deviant," eventually removes the wish when it becomes clear to him that Buddy has learned his lesson.
• Similarly to above deconstructed in Dossier On Detective Dubrovsky. A psychic admits that he can see through things but when his female listener is disturbed (or aroused) by this prospective he sorrowfully assures her that instead of all the good parts he can only see bones, organs and the bowel's contents.
• In Misfits, this is Jess's power. She was tired of people lying to her, and learned to see through all the bullshit, so gained the power to literally see through things.
• Justified in Intelligence (2014). What Gabriel is actually doing is using the chip to interface with spy satellite telemetry and/or wireless-enabled security systems, which the chip and his brain render as the ability to see through walls. No satellite or camera and his sight's no better than an ordinary human's.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "Family Values", the household robot Gideon uses his X-Ray vision to discover that Brooke Miller is an alcoholic who has a bottle of vodka hidden in the kitchen.
• In the Doctor Who Superhero Episode "The Return of Dr. Mysterio", young Grant develops all Superman's powers as he grows up, with the x-ray vision coming in when he reaches puberty. Despite the Doctor's sarcastic comment that this makes sense, he doesn't intentionally use it for voyeuristic purposes, and is embarrassedly trying to avoid ever looking at anyone, until he figures out how to control it.
• In The Boys, evil Superman analogue Homelander has this, and like the original it is blocked by one metal, zinc. For whatever reason — while zinc does make other metals stronger, it is not a radiation shield like lead.
• Peacemaker: When the team are raiding a bottling plant where the Butterflies package their food source, Peacemaker wears a helmet with X-Ray vision goggles, enabling him to identify which humans are actually hosts for Butterflies. It also allows him to see other Butterflies behind doors and around corners so he can anticipate them and shoot them when they're finally in front of him. At the end of the episode, Leota decides to try on the helmet for fun, and ends up discovering that Murn, their team leader, is himself a Butterfly.

Music

• "X-Ray Eyes" by KISS.

Tabletop Games

• In Space 1889, a possible invention is a heavy, energy consuming machine that lets you decide what you want type of materials you want to see through.
• A classic magic item in Dungeons & Dragons is the Ring of X-Ray Vision. Tends to traditionally come with complementary fan speculation how people in a fantasy setting would even know what x-rays are, but it does let its user see through walls and such. (Several detection spells are also frequently blocked more or less effectively by solid materials depending on their type and thickness, with lead usually being best and thus suggesting that, say, the magic used by a Detect Evil spell may also have some characteristics in common with "hard" electromagnetic radiation.)
• Naturally, most superhero games feature this as a possible power, and usually as one that's treated as explicitly distinct from, say, clairvoyance. The Hero System has its generic "N-Ray Vision", Mutants & Masterminds lets you enhance a character's vision with "Penetrates Concealment", and so on.
• The Dresden Files: The Paranet Papers mentions a minor magical talent who has the ability. However, it only works on drywall.

Toys

• BIONICLE has the Mask of X-Ray Vision; Kanohi Akaku or just "Akaku" for short.
  • The Great Ruru also has a limited version of this. In both cases, though, it doesn't seem to be literally x-rays.
  • The Piraka Avak naturally has X-Ray and telescopic vision.

Video Games

• An ability of Aiba in AI: The Somnium Files. When not used in attempts to ogle women—In which case, only being able to see their bones—It is used for plot-related purposes (such as spotting the Iris figure inside Moma's wall safe to determine he's a fan—And use that fact against him, or finding So's dismembered corpse sealed inside of a vase at his estate).
• Mario Party 6: The minigame Money Belt (renamed X-Ray Payday in Mario Party Superstars, to prevent confusion with the similarly-named, and also present in that game, Money Belts from Mario Party 4) has all players stand in the sides of conveyor belts where various boxes are being scanned through X-Ray screens and then transported forward. The objective is to open the boxes that have coins or coin bags within, making sure to memorize the contents scanned by the screens. If a player opens a box having a boxing glove, they'll be hit and stunned; and if they one containing a Bob-omb, they'll be hit and stunned for longer.
• Meritous: As the official game page says:
  The ethereal monocle allows you to see enemies you couldn't normally see. You can see enemies through walls and even invisible enemies with this artifact.
• Metroid:
  • In Super Metroid, the X-Ray Visor lets you see hidden passages, identify what parts can be destroyed with projectiles, and expose fake spikes.
  • In the Prime subseries she can also use this to find enemy weakpoints and track invisible enemies. Prime 3 lets you kill many tough enemies in a single blow if you find their weakpoint!
  • Also, one of the few somewhat realistic portrayals. X-ray vision mode is bright and white, similar to what X-ray scans look like, and is anything but regular-colored that someone like Superman sees in. You can also see the internal structure of things; like Samus's hand inside her Arm Cannon.
• Done a bit better in the video game Goldeneye Rogue Agent with M.R.I. (Magnetic Resonance Imaging. This vision mode allows you to see the silhouettes of enemy (and allied) soldiers through walls in a vaguely transparent white, but no more detail than that. It still doesn't work like it should, though...
• The video game NightFire has a blue tinted heat vision vision mode that gives enemy's silhouettes in misty red past obstacles. It works through solid stone walls and functions in ways typical of "x-ray" vision though.
• Deus Ex and its sequel has a vision augmentation that allows first night vision and then the ability to see people and animals through walls as figures made of white smoke.
• Batman: Arkham Asylum has 'detective mode' which lets you see enemies and NPC's as skeletons some distance away and through walls. It also shows important items and breakable walls.
  • Joker also has a pair of traditional X-ray glasses which he uses in the PlayStation 3-exclusive challenge missions. Lampshaded in Batman: Arkham Knight, where Aaron Cash's pre-recorded description of them in the GCPD evidence lock-up ("one pair of...actual X-ray specs") is clearly disbelieving.
• Early in Quest for Glory II, you can buy a pair of "x-ray glasses" (shaped like funny nose glasses) from the magic shop. Putting them on does nothing but display the message "everything looks like you're looking through a veil" and cause the magic shop owner to laugh. This, however, is also a vague clue to an Easter Egg: near the end of the game, a young woman has to change her clothes and steps behind a gauzy veil that's "just opaque enough to keep any would-be peepers from seeing anything fun". Putting the glasses on at this point turns the veil completely transparent.
• In Perfect Dark there is an item called the X-Ray Scanner that can see through walls. One of the weapons (the infamously overpowered FarSight) is a railgun with one of these scanners built into it.
• Wario: Master of Disguise parodies this with a treasure called the 'Forever X-Ray Glasses' From the description:
  • ''This amazing treasure lets you look through absolutely everything...which means that you end up seeing NOTHING AT ALL! Think about it. "
• In Persona 4: Arena, Aigis has a sensor package that allows her to spot hijackers through an airliner hull and also tell that Naoto is a girl under her clothes.
• Classified: The Sentinel Crisis grants you an enemy-detecting visor built in your Sentinel armor, which even calculates the number of hiding enemies for you.
• Shantae and the Pirate's Curse gives Shantae the X-Ray Specs, which will allow her to look at the contents of the mummy sarcophagi without opening them and triggering their curse.
• In Battlezone (1998), the SITE Camera special weapon allows tanks to see through terrain, which is rendered in wireframe like the tank's Enemy-Detecting Radar. It is generally of dubious utility, as the radar can pick up most enemies from behind terrain cover. The SITE camera returns in the sequel as an ISDF-exclusive weapon.
• In Snake Pass, Noodle can learn an ability called Snake Vision, which allows him to find collectibles by seeing through the environment and it can only be used when he isn't moving.
• Friday Night Funkin':
  • If you fail a song, you're treated to an x-ray of Boyfriend's fractured skeleton. It is apparent by the pulsating, light-blue spheres on his groin that his bones were cracked by blue balls. You can also see that his brain is in the shape of the word "Retry".
  • During the final song of Week 7, where Boyfriend is holding Girlfriend in one of his arms, getting a Game Over shows Girlfriend's skeleton alongside Boyfriend's, revealing that she is a demon as hinted by her different, red-colored skeleton and horns on her skull.
  • There is a Game Mod that renders the entire cast this way, though Boyfriend (discounting the Game Over screen), Skid and Pump lack the spheres on their groins to indicate balls. On the title screen of said mod, you could see Girlfriend wearing a pair of x-ray googles.
• In World of Warcraft, engineers can make Gnomish X Ray Specs which can see through other players' armor... but not undergarments. Not that this helps much with the "GAAHH! NAKED DWARF!" reaction.
• Dead by Daylight:
  • X-Ray Vision is achieved by the ability to see auras. To an extent, this is inherent to gameplay. Survivors will always see the auras of downed or hooked Survivors while Killers will always see the locations of generators and any hooks they have Survivors on.
  • Various perks and ability add-ons can be used to expand on the base aura reading. For example, the Survivor perk Bond lets you see the auras of any Survivors within a certain range, while the Killer perk Barbecue and Chili allows you to see the auras of Survivors outside of a certain radius whenever you put a Survivor on a hook.
  • The Shape, a.k.a. Michael Myers, has a build that allows him to do this. In normal play, the Shape starts out slower than normal but with no Terror Radius, an audible cue that alerts Survivors to the Killer's presence, powers up into a second level where his speed becomes normal for Killers and he gains a Terror Radius, albeit a small one, and from there he goes in and out of a third level where his Terror Radius grows much larger and he can One-Hit KO Survivors. Two of the Shape's addons, the Scratched Mirror and the Vanity Mirror, lock the Shape into his weaker levels, but give him the ability to see Survivor auras through walls when doing the stalking he would otherwise use to level up.
• Goose Goose Duck: The Birdwatcher Goose has a power that allows it to see through any and all walls around it, but at the cost of a much narrower range of vision while the ability is active.
• Pokémon: According to Luxray's Pokédex entry, its eyes can see through walls to seek prey and its lost young. This is shown in Detective Pikachu Returns, as this comes in handy when it comes to finding clues.
• One of the gadgets in Jetpack Joyride is the X-Ray Specs. It's main purpose is to show what vehicles are hidden inside the pickup boxes before collecting them. It also has more comedic effects, such as seeing scientists' underwear.

Webcomics

• In Girl Genius the vision-augmentation helmet Agatha and Jiminez put together has "x-ray vision" as one of its many settings. It is one of the settings which make Jiminez able to see the mechanisms of a very fancy vault door which makes him and Aldin able to open it. The first time Jiminez switches through the different modes, he accidentally switches to X-Ray at the moment he... "looks" at fellow lady-adventurer Larana.
• El Goonish Shive
  • Tedd's glasses had an "X-Ray" feature, designed specifically to see concealed weaponry. Whether they worked with actual X-rays, we don't know, since he removed the feature — Tedd is a pervert, but he's against "this kind of voyeurism." Later a guard at some MIB facility used much the same to check agent Wolf.
  • Later on, Tedd discovers that he has natural X-ray powers as an extent of his Aura Vision. Which he discovered while looking directly at a gender-bent Elliot.
• Vriska and Rose both have this in Homestuck, Rose gets hers from being the Seer of Light and Vriska has it from her Vision Eightfold.
• In Freefall, Ab²y is specifically said to be backscatter X-Ray equipped. We never see the world through his eyes, but given how hard Freefall usually is, we can assume that it works realistically.
• Schlock Mercenary obviously is hi-tech enough for this, and the resident Mad Scientist got such glasses.
• Nerf NOW!! explains about "Engievision":
  Engie: Didn't you notice the goggles we engineers are always using? Here, give it a try!
• Waterworks: One of the abilities of Slick's diving suit. It's a little more realistic than usual; if there is no x-ray source in the vicinity, the suit releases a lot of x-rays to compensate, which tends to be harmful to all life in the vicinity.
• Cyanide and Happiness takes it to its logical conclusion in this deconstructive parody.
• In A Miracle of Science, adult Martians in general have this ability as part of their general improvements over baseline humanity. Caprice uses this to diagnose a scaphoid fracture in Detective Prester's wrist after they go through a crash reentry - without a spacecraft.
• K.A.'s XAG suit in We Are The Wyrecats allows her to see through walls.
• Namechecked in Grrl Power where the women's shower room has a poster stating that no one on the team has X-Ray vision and that even if they did, they'd just see a skeleton.

Web Original

• Mitch Calrus of Fine Structure has this superpower along with intangibility.
  • This uses some kind of four-dimensional light, and he can control how far he sees. Great for voyeurism if you happen to be into women's cross-sections. Mitch isn't:
    "I can't just look at the skin below the clothes. I can't just peel away layers like that. It's a focus depth thing. And people just look red on the interior. Icky red and other nasty colours. Watching blood circulate isn't fun, it's horrific."
• In New Vindicators, a few characters have this power, including Sclera and Iris, brother and sister Neo-Sapiens with the power to see through anything. Unfortunately, they see through their own closed eyes, which led to early insomnia and their father would make them train in martial arts until they simply passed out from exhaustion.
• At the Whateley Academy in the webfiction Whateley Universe, there's a boy code-named Peeper. His only power is the ability to stare at people and look through their clothes. Maybe he could do something interesting with locked boxes or what-have-you, but he's not interested. This makes him one of the most annoying pains on campus, as he's constantly annoying the hot girls.
  • Initially, he kept the nature of his power a secret, even denying it outright ("That would be... uh... horridly, painfully bad, wouldn’t it?"); technically, it isn't 'x-ray' vision per se, but a form of psychic scrying, though the effect is the same. It is only after several girls set a magical trap for him (which projected an illusion of male genitals on them for anyone using a Esper ability to peer through their clothes) that word got around what he'd been doing for most of the school year.
  • In his combat final, we learn that he can also see through things like the fake rocks people use to hide door keys, so he can get into a lot of people's houses too.
• Dream: The main focus of this X-ray challenge video on the Dream Team channel. The challenge was to beat Minecraft without turning their X-ray off.

Western Animation

• Captain Hero in Drawn Together has this power. In one episode, he used it to spy on Foxxy, which resulted in her getting a brain tumor, since his X-ray vision actually produces radiation.
• The Fairly OddParents!: When Timmy's parents get superpowers, they briefly display this power to see what Timmy's homework is.
• An episode of Futurama involves Bender using X-ray sunglasses to cheat at poker. He accidentally gives himself away when he tells one of his opponents that he has a tapeworm.
• This is one of Stitch's abilities that involve his eyes. First seen using them in The Series episode "Clip" (when he scans the inside of Mertle Edmonds's house), his eyes glow green when he's using X-Ray Vision.
• Superman: The Animated Series:
  • When Clark showed it to Lana Lang...
    Lana: So, how many times have you peeked into the girls' locker room?
  • In one episode he manages to fry some aliens with it. And since they didn't look remotely human, he was perfectly okay with killing them.
• See-More, a H.I.V.E. Five villain in Teen Titans (2003), has X-ray vision that lets him see through Starfire's clothes, which causes her to "cover" herself in embarrassment.
• On ToddWorld, Vark the alien from Glick has three eyes, one of which is an x-ray eye, which makes him especially good at hide-and-seek.
• The M-Ray Contact Lenses gadget on Totally Spies!, so-called because they were supposedly designed for seeing through metal, but could be used for seeing through anything, like brick or concrete, or even like telescopes for reading tiny writing from across the room.
• In Total Drama World Tour, Gwen finds a pair of X-ray glasses in Cody's pocket; Heather mockingly says to use them to see what kind of underwear he's wearing. (Answer: he's not.)
• The Phineas and Ferb episode "No More Bunny Business" has the boys create their own pair of x-ray glasses, after ordering a dud one from a comic book mail ad. They use their newly created pair to find a lost ring inside a pipe drain, discover dinosaur fossils underground, and figure out which cereal box has the biggest prize inside, among other things. They try to mass-produce them, but their carrot supply winds up mysteriously disappearing.
• Xiaolin Showdown: The Falcon's Eye Shen Gong Wu allows its user to see through solid objects.

Real Life

• Adverts in comics for X-Ray Specs. Okay, any boy stupid enough to part with money in the hope of seeing through girls' clothes deserves to be ripped off, but shouldn't enough people have "seen through" this con by now and let the sellers go out of business?
  • You can buy those cheap in novelty shops. Yes, they still don't actually work, but then it's a novelty item, so you shouldn't expect too much— All they really do is blur the image of your hand and pull it slightly out of focus, making it seem like you can see the "bones" in your hand from where the focus of both eyes overlaps.
  • Some apps for mobile phones feature the same thing, saying they'll convert the camera of your cellular into a X-Ray one. Same as per X-Ray goggles mentioned above. (The idea that a software application could 'convert' a camera to an X-ray device is totally ludicrous to anyone who understands how software and X-rays actually work, of course.)
• Truth in Television. During the Cold War the KGB invented an X-ray device so powerful it could show the inside of a lock, enabling a safecracker to see the movement of the tumblers. Unfortunately the device emitted powerful bursts of radiation when being used — KGB agents would joke that you could tell a veteran safecracker by his lack of teeth!
• Backscatter Technology
• You can't simply press a button on Photoshop to do this (yet), but you can do something similar if the subject in the photo is wearing light and thin clothes. This is of course not true X-ray vision, but just enhancing something that is just barely visible to the naked eye.
• Range-R machines.
• Very strong, directed light, such as a photo-flash, can sometimes penetrate clothing that appears opaque in normal lighting conditions. This has been utilized by paparazzi who've shot pictures of unsuspecting celebrities where they appear to be wearing completely see-through clothes. X-rays? No, just a powerful flash from the right angle.
• Some consumer cameras are sensitive to radiation just outside of the normal range of human vision. Many fabrics which appear opaque in visible light are quite sheer in infrared light, so it's in some cases possible to get an image that shows what's underneath somebody's clothes, especially if you use a filter that blocks out the visible light. The same holds for some plastic materials, allowing you to see what's inside a closed box, as this article shows.
• One reason that airport security scanning technology is controversial is that some versions, in scanning a would-be air traveler for concealed weapons, generate a solid-looking image of their body shape that's detailed enough to show breasts, buttocks, and hints of genitalia.

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