By B.C. Kessner
FLIR Systems [FLIR] in a matter of months will start production of the groundbreaking “true thermal” binoculars the company debuted this week, according to an executive.
“We will be in production early next year on this,” David Strong, vice president of marketing at FLIR, told Defense Daily Wednesday. “It was really a no brainer…everything in here we make ourselves. It was just question of making it happen because we don’t have to rely on anyone else to design or produce anything.”
FLIR designed the Recon BN6 and BN10 to provide authentic binocular viewing with true depth of field capability. The systems integrate two thermal cameras, one for each eye, to provide the same parallax effect achieved by a set of human eyes, enabling the user to see things in 3-D.
Until Monday, when FLIR unveiled its new prototype at the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., thermal binoculars did not actually exist; the widely available alternatives were in fact bi-oculars, where both eyes viewed the image from a single camera. While they are effective in displaying heat images, users have no depth perception and cannot reliably distinguish distances.
Strong described the feedback as “fantastic” and is certain that the company will soon be providing the binoculars to users for evaluation and demonstration. “I suspect that the border patrol is going to be very interested. The special ops guys are very interested and we do a lot of work with them so it won’t be difficult to get [the thermal binos] into their hands and see what they think,” he said.
Since FLIR is almost completely vertically integrated, making at high volume the detectors, camera modules, optics, and everything that goes into the thermal binoculars, it was able to make the product and break through the cost barrier.
“Anybody could do this if they went and bought two cameras–from somebody like FLIR–but right away you start to see the stack up of costs that would go into that,” Strong said.
The uncooled IR technology is inherently lighter, lower power, and less expensive than cooled technology, and it is perfect for shorter range applications, Strong said. “We’ve got the ability with our high volume production to ride right down that cost curve and provide things that are affordable to equip large numbers of people,” he added.
The company sees the market as similar to many of the soldier-solution products it has supplied in the past, such as binoculars, monoculars, rifle sights for tactical and sniper use, clip on thermal imagers, and more.
“We’ve got all these solutions to equip the individual soldier, and that’s a price elastic type of market,” Strong said. “If you hit the sweet spot on price, it could be like [night vision goggles] where you can sell them in very large quantities. Every soldier, sailor, Marine, coast guardsman, border patrol agent around the world–that’s the potential market.”
Strong said the company was hoping to drum up requirements for the true thermal binoculars. He said the company anticipates many of the same type of requirements that keep finding their way into other optical systems. “People want to combine thermal with color visual, with a laser range-finding capability, then a laser target designator…I certainly see tactical additions to this capability, just like the traditional bino market,” he added.