[Animats]

Each unit has 16 or 64 little laser rangefinders in it. They all have to have uniform response (which, from their pictures, Ouster hasn't achieved yet) and be lined up properly. Eventually somebody will develop high volume ways to do that, but in the prototype stage they're probably hand assembled.

Image orthicons for TV cameras once cost $10,000 each, and color cameras needed three of them, plus another $50K or so of electronics to drive them. Today a cell phone camera costs about $10.