Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro • Hacker News Board

Re: Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro

#51

Post by memling » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

solinent wrote: post #20

jayd16 wrote: post #17

Are the demos impressive in a way I'm failing to spot? It still seems about on par with others and still has plenty of noise in the pop art chair and kitchen. I was hoping this would put the magic leap to shame but it doesn't seem much better.

Yup, flash lidar has some ways to go before it can become usable, in my opinion. I don't think there's much hope. I shouldn't say more! Instead of using the time to determine the distance as typical lidar does, it uses the phase difference, and requires a precise phase measurement. This unfortunately is not nearly as accurate, especially with such a low-powered laser.

> Instead of using the time to determine the distance as typical lidar does, it uses the phase difference, and requires a precise phase measurement. This unfortunately is not nearly as accurate, especially with such a low-powered laser.

To be honest, I'm a little curious about this because it seems exactly the opposite to me. In my experience, area scanners use phase shift methods to measure, but I know there's a lot of variety out there that I'm not exposed to. Low-powered lasers would, I expect, limit working distance--but I'm a little surprised to find it would have significant impacts on the measurement method.

Re: Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro

#52

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

blululu wrote: post #47

bochoh wrote: post #3

I would be curious to know if this could be used (with a heavy dose of software and a rotating mount) to replace a Matterport scanner for real estate agents. That would be a $2495-$3995 cost for device, a fixed cost of $19-$29 per house walkthrough and a $49-$149/mo hosting fee. Seems like a boatload of cash could be made for a first-to-market product here.

Great question. In theory - yes I think it would be possible. But there is a lot of software involved in producing and distributing such scans. Matterport does a great job in packaging and distributing these scans in a way that is easy for real estate agents to produce & share, and for buyers to view. There is probably a great business out there, but it does require a lot of development work.

[deleted]

Re: Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro

#53

Post by oefrha » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #44

oefrha wrote: post #22

Unfortunately for someone like me who’s not enthusiastic about photography at all and takes maybe a dozen photos a year, every time I buy a new iPhone or in this case an iPad Pro I feel like I’m wasting hundreds of bucks on a camera I’m not really gonna take advantage of.

If they built a version without cameras for the small subset of people who don’t even want a camera for FaceTime/video conferencing, chances are it would be more expensive than what you paid now. Apple would have to make separate backplanes, boxes, marketing material, etc, would have to create a separate iOS release (they couldn’t ship a camera app with the system, for example, and would have to change the UI that al…

There’s a huge chasm between no camera and pouring huge amounts of R&D into shipping a cutting edge camera every year and marketing entirely around that. I’m not sure how you jumped from my post to “a version without cameras”, as I did say I take a nonzero number of photos (mostly utility shots). One hell of a straw man.

Re: Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro

#54

Post by MrSandman » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 6:51 PM UTC

Fission wrote: post #38

bochoh wrote: post #3

I would be curious to know if this could be used (with a heavy dose of software and a rotating mount) to replace a Matterport scanner for real estate agents. That would be a $2495-$3995 cost for device, a fixed cost of $19-$29 per house walkthrough and a $49-$149/mo hosting fee. Seems like a boatload of cash could be made for a first-to-market product here.

100%. You won't even need any extra hardware to accomplish that. However, I would encourage anyone going this route to think closely about the incentive structures behind the product they're building, and validate them with real estate agents, photographers, and sellers. It's a lot more complicated than what many of us may give it credit for.

Aren’t you the founder of this company? Interesting you’re discouraging others from working in this. https://sendreality.com/

Re: Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro

#55

Post by apocalypses » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 6:52 PM UTC

id_ris wrote: post #23

apocalypses wrote: post #21

I've had a play around with the new ipad. The big problem is (as far as I can see), absolutely no way for a developer to get access to the underlying depth data. I'm assuming it's coming in the next version of iOS, because you _can_ get access to the faceid depth data in a useful format.

Is it not available through 'AVCaptureDepthDataOutput`? My understanding is that depth data is a separate channel stored in photos.

Maybe I screwed it up, I’m not the best developer ever. I took their sample code to extract the depth data from front camera and this worked - switching to .back caused it to return a nil device, so didn’t really know where to go after that.

Re: Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro

#56

Post by apocalypses » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

gdubs wrote: post #42

Ok, this is tangential but there’s a lot of people in this thread who seem to have a good knowledge of lidar: How close can you get to creating a decent topographical survey of your property with what’s available to consumers? Could you walk around with an iPad Pro and build a decent 3D model? Is there a not exorbitant drone solution?

I work at a company that does lidar SLAM. You can actually produce really high quality maps/slam with lidar/tof sensors, and it’s a lot more robust/dense than visual/imu mapping.

Re: Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro

#57

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

imposterr wrote: post #37

_asrm wrote: post #2

... the name LIDAR is a play on RADAR, but instead of using dangerous RAdio waves, it uses infrared light. hmmm...

For people downvoting this, this is actually a quote from the article. I'm honestly curious if this was serious, or a joke that went over my head.

[deleted]

Re: Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro

#58

Post by rodinia » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

MrSandman wrote: post #54

Fission wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. You won't even need any extra hardware to accomplish that. However, I would encourage anyone going this route to think closely about the incentive structures behind the product they're building, and validate them with real estate agents, photographers, and sellers. It's a lot more complicated than what many of us may give it credit for.

Aren’t you the founder of this company? Interesting you’re discouraging others from working in this. https://sendreality.com/

It actually sounds like they're saying it's definitely feasible and encouraging people to build the right product. Their comment from 7 months ago indicates this is something that's obviously important to them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20753553

Re: Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro

#59

Post by yellow_postit » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 7:25 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #9

I think LIDAR could be very cool but as the article alludes it definitely has the "Chicken & Egg" problem is that you need the hardware so developers can develop, and you need the software to justify having the hardware. Sounds like even the API isn't on-tap quite yet. It would definitely be cool if you could e.g. walk around a room and scan it into a home re-modelling app. I know the stated aim is more AR, and that'…

I think LIDAR in the iPad/iPhone is going to be as useful as the touchbar on Mac laptops.

Re: Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro

#60

Post by whywhywhywhy » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 7:26 PM UTC

The longer Apple goes without releasing their AR headset the weirder adding AR to the iPads and iPhones as some sort of developer platform test bed becomes.

It's fine for developers but for end users these handheld AR experiences are so frustratingly poor, frustrating in the sense that the tracking and occlusion tech is getting really good but poor that you're experiencing the whole thing through this silly handheld porthole to the world.

Just starting to get stranger and stranger that every year for around 5 years now we've had to have Apple showing off these features and we nod along knowing we'll never ever use them but understand they're only there for developers, like this lidar sensor.