You know this has existed for years, right?
I think there are cheaper ones coming out too, announced at CES.
Wish they were made a little less industrial looking. then make a VR headset and you got yourself night vision googles, how cool is that?
Thanks for posting about these OneBadWolf!!! They sure do look interesting, especailly the one with FLIR…… 
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Never liked NV goggles except for flying/driving. I prefer to preserve natural NV in one eye, so my personal NV is monocular. Never owned TI before.
I’ve see the TI add ons for cell phones, but the resolution was terrible. For a fully rugged unlocked Android cell, much less with TI, I think the price is very reasonable.
Maybe they should design night vision goggles with a feature that causes the brightness to gradually dim over 20 minutes. If they made it dim enough maybe you would have night adjusted vision once the ramp down is complete.
The point of night vision goggles is to see past the minimum that humans can see even when fully adjusted to the dark.
Basic NV is pretty simple and easy, but requires that the camera not have an “IR cut” filter (which many or most phone cams do not have). That’s usually just a ‘film’ type lens coating which can be chemically removed on cheaper cams. TI is essentially enhanced IR tuned to show temp variations without illumination while NV is tuned to show images especially with illumination. A brighter non-illuminated NV image will also be hotter with all other things being equal so it can be used as a crude TI. Nothing really new with either one.
Phil
I think I have the wife talked into it! $600 at Walmart, sign me up!
Ok. Having done a little more research, I might have been a little hasty. The way this thing works, is that it uses 2 cameras. One thermal imager, and the other the stock cell cam that overlays the detail onto the thermal image, which is incredibly low res. At best, 160x120. Probably half that or less.
This is fine in the daylight, but at night, a person would look like a stick man at best. Probably a blobby stick man. Now, if you paired it with a powerful IR illuminator… Here we go again.
It seems like I saw VGA resolution mentioned somewhere in the specs (640x480). While still not high res by any means that is plenty to see what you need to see in most cases.
I am interested in this but also skeptical of how it would work in the real world. The plug in flir version looks real nice since it works with other phones.
The 640x480 is the res of the composite 2 images. The 160×120 is the thermal component of it. Actually, the 160×120 spec is from the FLIR ONE Pro, which has not been released yet. The Cat phone uses the older FLIR ONE.
From the literature for the yet to be released FLIR ONE Pro:
The new FLIR ONE Pro features our Lepton thermal microcamera, which has four times the resolution of the standard third generation FLIR ONE_
So, the Cat phone actually has 1/4 the thermal res of 160×120.
Since the stock camera on the cell phone provides the detail in a 640x480 overlay, and the stock cam does not provide any detail in 0 light conditions, all you will see in darkness, is 40 X 30 blobs of color.
I am wondering though, if the cell cam detail could be added back, by using an active IR illuminator.
Full specs for the FLIR ONE Pro
FLIR ONE Pro Specifications
Model Number FLIR ONE Pro Gen 3
Certifications MFi (iOS version), RoHS, CE/FCC, CEC-BC, EN61233
Operating temperature 0 °C – 35 °C, battery charging 0 °C – 30 °C
Non-operating temperature –20 °C – 60 °C
Size 68mmW x34mm H x14mm D
Weight 36.5g
Mechanical shock Drop from 1.8m
Video:
Thermal and visual cameras with MSX
Thermal sensor Pixel size 12μm, 8 – 14μm spectral range
Thermal resolution 160x120
Visual resolution 1440x1080
HFOV / VFOV 55° ± 1° / 43° ± 1°
The FLIR ONE Pro is supposed to be released in the second quarter of 2017.
The specs for the thermal resolution of the standard FLIR ONE are nowhere to be found, but the composite res is 640x480, the same as the Cat phone.
I think it likely, that all the old FLIR ONE modules are being dispensed with in the Cat phone, so they can market the newer FLIR ONE Pro.
You only have to see that the FLIR ONE, and FLIR ONE Pro each have 2 separate lenses to realize that they are combining the images from 2 separate cameras.
The marketing is somewhat misleading.
Ah, so that is the catch, very low resolution. Still this tech will keep improving and in a few years it should be a lot better.
I remember just a few years back when night vision was hundreds of dollars and thermal was thousands. So any kind of thermal for this price and size is amazing.