[moralestapia]

My guess would be that's not "true" LIDAR. It's probably something akin to the Kinect hardware; an infrared pattern is projected, then distance is inferred depending on how it gets distorted, while LIDAR sends photons and measures them back (technically the first does that as well but w/e).

[Animats]

There have been Kinect sensors with true time of flight. The first Kinect used triangulation, but Microsoft switched to time-of-flight for later models.[1]

There are several ways to do this. At short ranges, they all work. Then it gets hard, because not much energy is coming back.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.05459

[moralestapia]

Nice, I didn't know that!

[solardev]

I don't think Apple would outright mislabel it if it were some other kind of depth sensor. iPhones do also combine data from the visible light cameras to aid in depth mapping, but the lidar sensor is a separate emitter and receiver.

As far as I can tell, it's true lidar?

Technical analysis: https://4da.tech/?p=582

Being used for science: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01763-9