The book club I'm a member of is thick with physicians. They were really enamored with the medical implications of the trip to the jungle highlighted in the book. You don't want Leishmaniasis -- really you don't.





But this book had a very interesting description of LiDAR and why it was important for exploration. The importance and value of a point cloud.





Microvision will make it inexpensive and everywhere.... "mid-range LiDar."

CBS This morning -- Lost City

Microvision Twitter





SemiEngineering.com

Reality check

Put in perspective, LiDAR is an well-known technology that has finally found a lucrative market application.

“The principle of LiDAR – the light sent through the pulse and echo of time-of-flight – has not really changed,” said one industry source. “The physics have not changed ever since its invention, for the past 40 years or so. The evolving changes are more in the components and system integration. There’s no fundamental principle change.”

Flash LiDAR has been in development for the past five years, the source noted, likening it to a CMOS image sensor. “This is an area to watch for—the flash LiDAR technology. It promises a very low cost of solution, not necessarily high performance.”

Kevin Watson, senior director of product engineering at Redmond, Wash.-based MicroVision, a publicly held company, disagrees. “I don’t think that’s going to go anywhere,” he said of flash LiDAR. “For many years, the Holy Grail of LiDAR sensors we thought to be a MEMS mirror-based laser scanner, because they’re super-small, relatively inexpensive to manufacture in great quantity, and very reliable. They’re small enough to hide several around an automobile.”

Watson calls LiDAR “the most important sensor” in automotive electronics. “Vision systems are great, but they’re a totally passive system. LiDAR is active.”