Excellent find! I was really puzzled what a "Class 1 infrared camera" was, but it makes perfect sense to have a Class 1 laser[1] with an infrared camera to pi

Excellent find! I was really puzzled what a "Class 1 infrared camera" was, but it makes perfect sense to have a Class 1 laser[1] with an infrared camera to pick up the spots. This also makes a lot more sense for detecting distance via triangulation: discrete spots are going to be much easier to triangulate than doing a two-camera vision system, e.g. detect unpredictable edges, correlate the two cameras' edges, and determine distance. The hologram projection concept makes a lot of sense. A full scanning laser would be prohibitively expensive. A hologram projection would be robust and cheap, but less accurate and require much more software processing. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_safety#Class_1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_safety#Class_1