The story is much longer than that. Velodyne got its start at the DARPA challenge. The first year many of the teams were using single line rotating scanners fr

The story is much longer than that. Velodyne got its start at the DARPA challenge. The first year many of the teams were using single line rotating scanners from a company called SICK. These sensors were around $5000 each, and some teams had several on their vehicle. They were easy to use, and could send data over serial. Each team mounted their SICK lasers in different orientations. Some well funded teams had several pointing forward and to the sides, but most had only one if they had one at all. One team mounted their scanner so it could rotate around the middle of the scan line and it would sweep out a hemisphere of points. One had theirs mounted on a pole that accidentally wobbled forward and backward and gave some interesting data about the road ahead. Carnage Mellon University had a huge aimable lidar pod on top, but I heard they didn't use it. Team DAD was using stereo vision computed in realtime by a dsp, but didn't have lidar as far as I know. The second year it seemed like SICK lidar was everywhere. Every team had several of them. The teams were all much more similar, and only a couple stood out. At the DARPA Urban challenge was where I recall seeing the Velodyne for the first time. David Hall had a booth at the event in victorville. Stanford, who had won the last event, had one on top. Everyone was drooling over the amount of data they gave. There were several other competing lidar products there as well, but velodyne was the favorite by far. Around this time, time of flight cameras were just starting to be built, but were even more expensive than velodyne. The kinect V1 was getting a lot of attention, but it used a low resolution depth method. Intel decided that time of flight cameras were the future or something and offered time of flight camera dev kits for super cheap... this sparked Kinect V2. In my opinion Intel was the reason the price came down, Velodyne raised the bar as far as points per second, but it was DARPA that started the ball rolling on demand in the first place.