Meh
Not much use without the targeting laser, harpoon and plasma bolt attachments though...
It's seemed like a long road, perhaps, but arguably the destination has been reached. PDAs have incorporated mobile phones and acquired increasingly zippy and flexible mobile/wireless data connections. Cameras have come aboard, and in some cases have become quite good. The resulting smartphones have since added the capabilities …
Simple IR night vision is trivial, just dismantle a webcam, pick apart the lens assembly and swap out the filter that blocks IR for one that blocks everything but IR. Then you can play games using your TV remote as a torch.
Proper thermal images are much more fun and much more expensive. A previous employer bought one (they're useful for finding hotspots in electronics) and had to sign all sorts of bits of paper because it was classified as a weapon under US export regs.
It doesn't give you night vision. Not noticeably more than the original visible-light more camera could see at night either. IR-only cameras do create some rather pleasing photographic effects, but to use them at night you'd need an infra-red illuminator of some kind (a TV remote will work fine over short range).
It's entirely possible that the cheap-and-nasty sensors in most webcams just aren't up to the job. I expect someone ripping apart a DSLR and removing it's IR filter could get better results at night. I have no intention of taking a screwdriver to mine to find out though!
I've always wanted a thermal imaging camera but when you'd be incredibly lucky to get one for as low as £1000 it's not likely I'll own one, but I have played with IR and CCD/CMOS cameras, don't bother with cheapie CMOS cameas, a b/w CCD unit is one of the best (and easily available cheaply) ways of getting night vision with a bunch of IR LEDs for illumination.
I do have a 1st gen image intensifier night vision monocular which is a nice toy but it's bulky, heavy and cumbersome to use for any real length of time which is why one day I'll turn a pair of LCD video glasses into night vision goggles with a decent camera + IR LED illumination.
This article's title was a bit misleading, I was hoping they'd already created a miniature thermal camera sensor, then maybe the overall prices of thermal cameras could come down to something a bit more realistic.
With 'flu.
Works both ways, sunshine. She might have a similarly equipped camera, and be checking to make sure your python (IT angle) is worth a syphon.
Which kinda obsoletes the old trick of a rolled-up pair of socks down your trousers in the nightclub.
(Down the front, natch!)
A friend used to work for a Thermal Imaging company and one day we borrowed a camera to do some tests. We went to a local park to see how far away we could identify the rabbits.
So, you can picture then scene, 2 adult males walking in a park at 10pm with a huge bright yellow thing held to one or the others face. It's lucky nobody saw us.
We never did find any rabbits but we did find a "beast with 2 backs" in one bush and a drunk/tramp asleep in another. :)
The one thing the proliferation of thermal cameras will do is remove the last hiding places of those who wish to remain hidden. Police will no longer need a helicopter to find which wheelie bin the crim is hiding in, nighttime Parklife will be curtailed unless you wrap up in one of those foil thermal blankets, and it will be impossible for people to deny being naughty in the office cupboard as your "bits" glow much brighter if they have recently been used! <LOL>
I see a comeback of the whole "fig-leaf underwear" touted for the airport perv scanners, but this time blocking heat signatures. The thing about thermal scanners is they can (depending on sensitivity) see through walls, which means thermal cloaks for home exteriors most likely (unless you don't mind an audience with cell phones watching you and the missus). Not sure if metal siding would block the thermals....don't believe it helped in the Arnold movie "Eraser"...
I think even wikipedia on a bad day is probably a more reliable reference than "Eraser".
No thermal camera can see through a wall. They are used for building inspections to determine heat loss through walls and if the walls weren't completely opaque to IR then you'd be unable to measure the temperature of the wall itself (since you'd see what was behind it) and so you'd be unable to assess heat loss. Google for some IR images and see for yourself.
Similarly, despite various rumours to the contrary, I'm not aware of any clothing fabric that is opaque in the visible but transparent in any part of the IR. On the other hand, close fitting outfits transmit body heat better than loose ones, so if IR cameras ever go mainstream it probably will have an effect on fashion. (You may have less luck googling for example images here. It isn't the sort of thing corporate types put on their web-sites.)
On the fashion issue, much the same probably applies to the (very) near IR and near UV, both of which might be accessible to bionic eyes later this century. (They don't suffer from the wavelength problem I allude to in another comment. I believe various species have been exploiting/enjoying these wavelengths for a few hundred million years, so there's stuff to see if you have the gear.) Bionic eyes *will* be developed for medical purposes, and will then come down in price to the point where they are available as "cosmetic" items for those who wish to upgrade their mortal frame.
The lizard army waits until everyone has these thermal cameras, and is used to relying on them for detecting hidden enemies, then attacks, safe because they are cold-blooded and match the background temperature. WE MUST RESIST THIS FIENDISH PLOT!!!!
(OK, it's not going to work, "cold-blooded" means they don't use their metabolism to control their internal temperature, they will still warm up when exerting themselves)
Speaking with just a tad of inside knowledge, there are two barriers. The first is cost, but this has followed a fairly predictable downward slide over the last twenty years and although no-one is offering anything below £1000 yet, no-one really doubts that there is a market and so it will happen. Lewis' timescale is about right and I'll probably be an early adopter because I work for a company that makes them.
Probably not in phones, though. The longer wavelengths that give you images from room-temperature objects are around 10 microns, compared to 0.5 microns for visible light. That has an immediate effect on the size of detectors (because you can't shrink a single pixel much below one wavelength) and that in turn has an effect on the size of optics. A megapixel visible camera is only a couple of millimetres across and will deliver usable images with a bit of bent plastic for a lens. A megapixel IR detector is the size of 35mm film and so the associated camera isn't going to shrink much below SLR sizes unless you can work around the Fraunhofer limits. (That's going to be "challenging". Near-field optics continues to astonish anyone who took a traditional optics course at uni, but I'm not holding my breath.)
Speaking as a retired physicist, that doesn't sound entirely plausible for near IR, based on the wavelength ratio being the same as the size ratio. But that aside...
1) Who needs Megapixels anyway. Fisher Price Pixelvision style would surely be enough from an entertainment point of view ? If necessary, with lots of digital interpolation that the average punter would never spot.
2) One day, some micromechanical genius with a historical memory will think of scanning by moving the lens rather than solely by having multipixel sensors.
Or maybe not.
Flame purely because they probably look nice in IR, be it near or far.
Near IR isn't useful for room temperature objects (Try working out kT/h for a few temperatures of interest.)
Current state of the (commercial) art is roughly VGA resolution with the pixels at 25 micron pitch for the 7-14 micron waveband. That's smaller than 35mm, but it isn't megapixel either.
"One day, some micromechanical genius..."
Quite possibly, or skip the moving lens bit and simply craft a million micro-lenses directly onto the detector like an insect, which is why I won't say it can't be done and which might explain DARPA's interest. A friend sent me this the other day: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/01/new-material-blocks-light-from-exhibiting-diffraction.ars. If you can pick your lens material to have any optical properties you like, and then use some micromechanical wizardry to shrink the whole package down to the size of a postage stamp, even the plot of Eraser starts to seem plausible.
Beer, to drink whilst I sit in front of the warm fire you provided. :)
If you can have 8MP or 12MP "normal" cam on a phone, sure you should be able to fit a 0.5MP thermal cam. Price isn't a problem either, since the first application is for military, and I'm 100% sure Apple can charge what ever it wants on iPhone.
Think what kind of cool apps you can write if there is thermal cam on the phone.
OOh, imagine that. A thermal imager for every tech's workshop.
I could find that very handy indeed, imagine the diagnostics possibilities.
No more inexplicable shutdowns, just compare Board A with archive of known good boards, and spot the overheating part(s) or broken tracks etc.
Also handy for locating shorts between board layers for diagnostics, as well as fixing those stubborn intermittents where a part has a microfracture or bad joint at one end.
Not to mention comparing newly fitted parts with the original to confirm that the problem isn't fixed before your $$$ component goes KafizzztBANG.
These are sometimes used in industry but the cost is too high.
BTW there is a way to make your own using ZnS:Ag:Cu glow powder as this somewhat responds to both near infrared and thermal to a limited extent.
AC, because if I ever get this to work it is SOOO going in EPE.
I don't see why this idea shouldn't be commonplace in the not too distant future. If the purpose is simply to locate hotspots a relatively low pixel count will suffice. I can imaging a phone clipped to a shoulder strap with the video fed to a Head-Up-Display as used in so many applications today - attached to a pair of glasses or a hat. Add to that the phone's video recorder with GPS data and sound plus the ability to use visual and/or IR or even mixed imagery and you'd have quite a nice little self-contained low profile surveillance system. I'd have thought that mass production would make the cost of small quartz, ZnSe or other IR-transparent material lenses low enough for general use. An application for remote control would fairly trivial to produce.