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by jauntywundrkind 917 days ago
My understanding is that very few consumer lidar sensors work well in daylight. It's hard to send out & detect significantly meaningful pulses of light, when there's sunlight all around.

I have an Intel L515 which is pretty remarkable in that sometimes you can get some depth finding outdoors. This is just a hobby item for me, I'm not an expert, but this launched as a fairly impressively long range & capable $350 USB3 system, and it seems like the market hasn't much comparable to it. Phones certainly I'd expect to be significantly worse.
1 comments
coldtea 917 days ago
>My understanding is that very few consumer lidar sensors work well in daylight. It's hard to send out & detect significantly meaningful pulses of light, when there's sunlight all around.

Aren't many "self driving car" sensors lidar? This would imply they can work in daylight - perhaps they don't necessarily depend on light on the sunlight spectrum?

(Or perhaps you don't consuder them consumer? Though those cars are consumer products, they're not made for military or industrial use)

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jauntywundrkind 917 days ago
Many cars are lidar,, but they use much stronger, bigger, and higher power lasers, on very expensive and precise rotator assemblies.

The L515 I mentioned was somewhat advanced at least for it's day because it used MEMS to steer its light source. That gave it leading class performance/size but it's still big and kinda hot-ish. Maybe we can keep scaling that kind of system performance to smaller sizes but even this package was pretty cutting edge & gave much better falloff than many competing systems, and was still largely an indoor sensor.

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