Lidar sensors and technology have gained attention among a slew of advanced technologies promising to create tomorrow’s self-driving cars. But lidar sensors are also prominent in efforts to produce digital twins and metaverse use cases.
In an article in VentureBeat by George Lawton.
A core aspect of digital twins lies in updating models of the real world with high fidelity and at high frequency. Lidar complements technologies like stereoscopic cameras for capturing 3D data from the physical world that could be piped into digital twins or metaverse applications.
Core lidar technology has been around for nearly 50 years, but until recently it has been expensive to build and complicated to weave into new workflows. All of that is starting to change with the advent of new approaches, cheaper implementations, and more flexible lidar data workflows.
Lidar sensors show promise in autonomous cars and related systems because they measure the distance to objects at incredible speeds and with high precision. They work much like radar, using light rather than radio waves — the lidar signal is reflected off objects and the light that returns is then measured. Traditional lidar measures the time of flight of signals, but newer techniques use other properties of light to cut costs, improve precision, or speed reaction time.
The business case for lidar sensors
The price of these systems has dropped from tens of thousands of dollars a few years ago to tens of dollars for mass-produced sensors embedded into tablets and smartphones such as the iPhone 12 Pro. Apple has kept mum about its lidar source, but one teardown of the first iPad with the tech found a laser scanner from Lumentum and sensor from Sony combined into a lidar system.
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