by Jason Snell
What the iPad Pro’s LIDAR sensor is good for
Sebastiaan de With of the Halide app team has just posted about the strengths and weaknesses of the 2020 iPad Pro’s back-side sensors, most notable the LIDAR sensor:
While this new LIDAR sensor isn’t something that is (currently) able to augment our ‘traditional’ photography, it opens the door to new applications that are powerful and creativity-enabling in their own right.
This is a tool for room-scale geometry capture, and the LIDAR dots just aren’t numerous enough to be used as a source in photographs. (You’d be better off calculating the parallax from the two rear cameras.) But I admire the team’s attempts to figure out how the LIDAR scanner works and imagine its possible applications.