Imagine, if you lose your pet out in dark, or a burglar hiding in bushes while you’re alone at home finding him nowhere, or what if you forget about your meal been placed over stove, or you are wandering outside in dark and suddenly light gets cut-off, or even more worse, if your home catches a fire and nobody notices that. Aren’t these things to be worried about? Yes they are, but NOT NOW because FLIR Systems has recently offered to provide Thermal Imaging Cameras in the palm of your hand provided you’re an IPhone user. FLIR-1 Case provides the thermal vision capability to IPhone 5/5s users. The product focuses on consumer level activities that range from searching your pet in dark to defending your home against burglaries. Detecting Gas Leak, Searching fault in appliances, Night navigation, Coastal Surveillance, Inspection of hotspot areas, Thermal visualization of environment, Heat detection, Homeland security application, and plenty of other things can be fetched out of this mini gadget.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUq87-DtfUM[/youtube]
To use your IPhone as a Thermal Imaging Camera all you got to do is to fix the FIR-1 case in your IPhone. Once it’s done, you are ready to do your things. VGA Sensor and IR sensor together “combines Optical Spectra with Thermal Image and improves Image resolution”. The most interesting thing you could do with this device is observing heat signatures from everything that surrounds you. At this moment, the point that might be bugging your mind is Battery Issue. If it’s so, then you don’t even need to worry about it even for a jiffy. This case has its own internal battery that powers up the camera for hours so it wouldn’t kill your battery.
The cost of this gadget is about $330, seems pretty expensive, isn’t it? Well, $350 wouldn’t be a big figure if you think of the services that it provides to you. Okay, some might say why would anyone spends way this much when the device would be made obsolete as new mobile phones hit the market. But, it’s not exactly alike, because FLIR has been planning to make it compatible with the new models and it’s even expected this technology would even be available for android users near the end of this year.
Teich, CEO of FLIR claims that FLIR-1 is “the first consumer focused thermal imager.” The claim is truly valid as this technology represents a big leap in the progress to introduce thermal imaging in the hands of consumers.