Intel releasing an affordable solid-state Lidar camera #Lidar @Intel

Via a tweet by Chris Anderson, Intel has announced a new Lidar camera (they are calling it):

Price of $349 is very compelling. It’s described as a “Lidar Camera”, but it’s essentially a solid-state Lidar. It returns 23m pixels points/sec in a 70°x55° cone with 9m range. That’s very high def.

I’m impressed
https://ift.tt/2rtS5my

For reference, a normal high accuracy scanner to date might be 10m points in a 360 sphere.

Per the product page, some impressive stats:

• proprietary MEMS mirror scanning technology
• less than 3.5W power consumption for depth streaming
• max distance 9 meters
• 23 million pixels per second
• only 100 grams

Their open‑source SDK 2.0 offers a variety of wrappers supporting popular programming languages and platforms. The newest addition to the Intel RealSense Technology family uses the same SDK as all other current generation devices, allowing an easy transition from any of their other depth cameras.

• OpenCV
• Python
• PCL
• C/C++/C#
• nodejs
• ROS
• Unreal engine
• LabVIEW
• Matlab
• OpenNI
• Unity

See more in the video below and on the product page. This is one to watch.