Just a note on UX and visualization: Mapping temperature to a color/wavelength is not the perceptually best way to convey data. Humans are not good at estimating the distance between two data points when using a rainbow color scale. Using luminosity would be much better, or even a color scheme that uses saturation. See e.g. <a href="http://colorbrewer2.org/" rel="nofollow">http://colorbrewer2.org/</a>. Different schemes are perceptually good to use depending on whether your data is categorical, scalar or(/and) has a fixed center value that has semantic meaning. It doesn't look like the actual camera uses this mapping, but the demo pictures on the front page do. I'm not sure which color scale is used for the actual camera interface.<p>A side note to this: Sometimes, users expect a particular color mapping and will object to using a coloring scheme that is perceptually better. E.g. doctors often view diffusion tensor images where each point in the image represents a 3-dimensional value, using the RGB colors for each dimension. This is a perceptually horrific choice, since practical demonstrations would reveal that there is significant perceptual ambiguity when viewing data represented like this. But an engineer once made a prototype that used this mapping, and now the operators are unwilling to change their habits.
Interesting. As a FLIR camera used to be expensive, I built my own thermal IR camera for $120 (2011): <a href="http://oi60.tinypic.com/2820yg2.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://oi60.tinypic.com/2820yg2.jpg</a>
I got one of these to debug thermal leakage. I very much like it.<p>Here's a shot of my laptop: <a href="http://bochs.info/img/IMG_0676-20140822-211311.png" rel="nofollow">http://bochs.info/img/IMG_0676-20140822-211311.png</a><p>If anyone's curious about something specific, I'll gladly take requests for photos. It's super interesting to see things from a temperature perspective.
Worth mentioning the "Affordable thermal imaging" Kickstarter project[1] which currently has about 14 days to go. The nice thing about this product is that it is not tied to a specific phone or tablet, is less expensive than the FLIR One, and you don't need to frequently close a "shutter" to re-calibrate to boot.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1075169276/hemaimager-accessible-thermal-imaging-for-smart-de" rel="nofollow">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1075169276/hemaimager-a...</a>
I'm not really thrilled about it being for a specific phone that is likely to have a physical form factor not guaranteed to have any particular lifetime.
I want to get one but they launched their product disastrously close to the iphone6 launch. I'm going to wait for their iPhone 6 version because I don't intend to keep my iphone5 around.<p>I still have my iPhone 4 but it is gathering dust and the batteries are dead so I don't want to waste $350 on something similar.
FLIR captures some interesting stuff in F1 Racing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvuBe6b2iVk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvuBe6b2iVk</a>
Is there something specific about the camera in the Iphone that would preclude doing a similar thing to android phones? Or is it just a matter of uniformity of the housing?