Tag Archives: FLIR

Thermal Imaging: Hotspot for Seeking Heat

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Santa Barbara is a world leader in infrared technology, with a long history that dates back to the scientists at the 1960s-era Hughes Aircraft Co., which later became the Santa Barbara Research Center.

With present-day industry bigwig FLIR located here, along with defense and aerospace industry heavyweights like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and companies such as SE-IR Corporation, Electro Optical Industries, Seek Thermal, and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging developing technology for consumer and industrial applications—from smartphones and cars to night-vision cameras and sensors—this sector of tech is definitely a hot one.

“The Santa Barbara office is really the nerve center of a lot of our cores and components,” said Vatche Arabian, director of content marketing for FLIR, whose name is an acronym for “forward-looking infrared.”

With the Central Coast as the home to approximately 450 of its 3,000 employees worldwide, FLIR is considered the global leader in the design, manufacture, and marketing of thermal imaging infrared cameras.

Seek Thermal was founded in 2012 by industry pioneering scientists Bill Parrish and Tim Fitzgibbons, who spent 40 years advancing the state of military and professional-grade thermal-imaging technology. Seek is their third venture, following the successful acquisitions of their last two companies, Amber Engineering and Indigo Systems, which is now part of Raytheon and FLIR, respectively.

Their mission is to make thermal imaging a part of everyday life. “We make devices, for example, that turn your phone into a thermal imager,” explained Seek’s CEO and president Mike Muench. “We make handheld thermal imagers. We make products specifically for the fire and safety space, which are also stand-alone thermal scanning products.”

With manufacturing on-site in Goleta, the team of 100 employees at Seek Thermal was able to respond quickly to the COVID pandemic and the demand for screening measures. Said Muench, “We now make a scanning system for helping businesses to screen employees for elevated body temperature.”

thermal.com

Tech Talk Special Issue for Santa Barbara Independent, published October 1, 2020.

Tech Talk Special Issue for Santa Barbara Independent, published October 1, 2020.

 

Tech Talk Special Issue for the Santa Barbara Independent, originally published on October 1, 2020.

To read the issue as it appeared in print, please click here, Tech Talk 768_10_01_20

 

How FLIR Steals Moments in Spotlight

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FLIR's technology used in the 2018 film Rampage, courtesy photo.

FLIR’s technology used in the 2018 film Rampage, courtesy photo.

With appearances in Sicario, Ozark, Silicon Valley, The Haunting of Hill House, Transformers: The Last Knight, Speechless, and Extinct or Alive, among others, FLIR is more than familiar with the on-screen close-up.

The thermal imaging tech company, which employs approximately 450 of its 3,000 employees in Goleta, uses product placement as an important part of its marketing strategy. “We really approach placement in a collaborative way,” said Vatche Arabian, director of content marketing. “While some companies may actually go out and buy a placement on a show, we don’t typically do that. Often, it’s cases where folks want to achieve something unique, and we partner with them to help them do that.”

Of course, sometimes opportunity just knocks. “The crazy, last minute ones are the ones that we seem to get the biggest lift out of,” said Arabian, referring to the 2017 VMA performance of 30 Seconds to Mars, in which actor/musician Jared Leto wanted to do the thing with thermal cameras. “We had maybe a week-and-a-half notice for that one. Trying to realize what they were trying to do and find the best way to do that was terrifying, but then the end result was amazing.”

FLIR cameras were also used on the two Sicario movies. “In the tunnel, when it’s in thermal vision, we worked with Roger Deakins to have him use the FLIR science camera, and he couldn’t have told that story without it,” said Stacy Jones, CEO and founder of Hollywood

Branded, the marketing agency that works with FLIR. “They were in a pitch-black tunnel, and he was trying to actually show what it is like for the military and for those people who were running from across the border.”

In the movie Rampage, FLIR provided a pilot and its plane, fully kitted out with all the FLIR technology, usually reserved for large-scale demonstrations of their product line to military or government buyers.

“There was a fictional big quarry scene,” said Jones. “It existed, but they made it look way bigger than it was through movie magic. And they had the plane sweeping over it, filming in thermal and feeding a livestream down to the director at the same time, so they could get the vision and the day scenes and the night scenes and the thermal all captured while the big ravaging beast that they put in later on was able to storm in with special effects.”

Product placement works best on-screen when it’s helping to tell the story, said Jones, who founded her agency in 2007, with BlackBerry as her first client. “Technology is something that is a great storyteller when it’s contributing to who the character is, to driving a story element, and contributing to making that scene more real,” she explained.

flir.com

Tech Talk Special Issue for Santa Barbara Independent, published October 1, 2020.

Tech Talk Special Issue for Santa Barbara Independent, published October 1, 2020.

 

Tech Talk Special Issue for the Santa Barbara Independent, originally published on October 1, 2020.

To read the issue as it appeared in print, please click here, Tech Talk 768_10_01_20