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Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro

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Re: Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro

#71
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 reads more as cautious encouragement to me, but if you are correct, a disclosure would be appropriate.

Re: Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro

#72

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…

Apple's not going to launch a consumer feature until they think it's insanely great. Until then they need developers to keep working at it.

Wish they'd taken that approach with Catalina...

Re: Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro

#73

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…

Apple's not going to launch a consumer feature until they think it's insanely great. Until then they need developers to keep working at it.

That's my issue, they keep launching these close to useless features because they're being developed for another product.

That's why this feels un-Apple

Re: Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's not going to launch a consumer feature until they think it's insanely great. Until then they need developers to keep working at it.

Wish they'd taken that approach with Catalina...

different teams, and plus the macos team at apple is notorious for releasing buggy and half baked software.

Re: Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro

#75
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does the price compare to traditional survey methods?

Depends on what you’re comparing to what. Big spinning lidars on cars are still expensive (few thousand dollars) but are coming down on price. Handheld 3D scanners on the other hand might start to become obseleted by a combination of cheap phone camera + lidar (really tof) sensors that are evidently cheap enough to put on phones. They can actually produce really high quality (SLAM) maps - Apple has figured out that they can have a much faster initial mapping phase by not having to do monocular mapping for their AR. So I guess I’m saying it’s cheaper and a bit worse, but it’s rapidly getting better.

Re: Lidar: Peek into the Future with iPad Pro

#76

Wonder how well it would work as night vision? Also my biggest wish with this tech is to be able to use with a 3D printer when you need to add a replacement part or some sort of shim.

one of the "real" applications of Lidar, which is aerial photogrammetry, is to map terrain from the sky. It is very often done at night, as there is very little traffic. You should be fine with measuring objects in the dark with this iPad Lidar as far as I can tell.

About 3D printing - the iPad Lidar seems to have a _very_ low resolution, so for 3D printing you should wait for some next generations of micro-lidars.

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