The iPhone 12's camera specs have finally been unveiled - and we now know that the iPhone 12 Pro range is going to be using the new LiDAR scanner on the back. That's right, the same mysterious dot that first appeared on the iPad Pro 2020.
What does lidar mean?
Lidar stands for light detection and ranging, and has been around for a while. It uses lasers to ping off objects and return to the source of the laser, measuring distance by timing the travel, or flight, of the light pulse.
How does lidar work to sense depth?
Lidar
is a type of time-of-flight camera. Some other smartphones measure
depth with a single light pulse, whereas a smartphone with this type of
lidar tech sends waves of light pulses out in a spray of infrared dots
and can measure each one with its sensor, creating a field of points
that map out distances and can "mesh" the dimensions of a space and the
objects in it. The light pulses are invisible to the human eye, but you
could see them with a night vision camera.
A typical lidar point cloud
What is a typical lidar look like?
Velodyne’s HDL-32E & HDL-16E lidar sensors are designed to exceed the demands of the most challenging, real-world industrial applications, including autonomous vehicle control and operation, mobile terrestrial mapping, aerial 3D mapping, and security surveillance.
The following are two lidar sensors by velodyne lidar.
What LiDAR will let us do on the iPhone 12 Pro
Using our experience of seeing the tech on the iPad Pro 2020, we'll can explore the kind of experiences LiDAR could open up on the new iPhones – and, ultimately, the Apple Glasses.
Possible applications include
AR gaming
Rendering user environment into AR games.
RGBD matching
Matching local geometric features on real-world depth images is a
challenging task due to the noisy, low-resolution, and incomplete nature
of 3D scan data. These difficulties limit the performance of current
state-of-art methods. The iphone pro 12 will provide a cheaper and a user friendly method for correspondences between partial 3D data and image data observed in the environment, providing high definition images, and rendering it in 3D.
Hologram based communication
I think everyone remembers this seen from starwars. With lidars incorporated it would be first step towards hologram based communication, as the lidar sensor can capture the point clouds representing the person/thing its pointed to.
Simple person 3D miniature models and printing
Well this is already here. But now instead of visiting a shop doing this everyone with a iphone will be able to create models of what ever they are pointing there cameras to.
