[marvin]

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. http://colorbrewer2.org/. 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.

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.

[dm2]

It probably wouldn't be hard to make an option that switches between different types of viewing styles, it's all on the software side.

Here is one camera that can switch views: http://nightvisionplanet.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/i...

[devindotcom]

It doesn't seem too strange to use a scale that corresponds to commonly-encountered heat levels, as perceived - yellow, orange, red, white, blue or something - it's not exactly logical, but people grasp it quickly because it has a familiar analogue. You could use a plain luminosity based presentation, but that's not the way humans have experienced heat for the last 40,000 years. It may not be mathematically perfect, but it's what we've got.

[porsupah]

The style of visualisation is indeed configurable within their app, as noted in Wired's review:

http://www.wired.com/2014/08/a-review-of-the-iphone-infrared...

There are, apparently, also third-party apps available.

[chuckledog]

I had a chance to try out the flir one for a day. Pretty sweet but not perfect. It has a number of color scales prominently featured in the iPhone UI. Grayscale might match lumosity.

I used "contrast" to quickly identify hot / cold parts of my house, then "spot meter" to measure the actual temp. Found out part of my attic is not insulated. That's money going out through the roof.