You can get 3D data from a single moving camera. The technique is called structure from motion and has been demonstrated to work well more than a decade ago. T

You can get 3D data from a single moving camera. The technique is called structure from motion and has been demonstrated to work well more than a decade ago. The biggest problem with relying on visual data is that you get very noisy data. Poor lighting and reflective or glossy surfaces cause problems (I'm not sure what current state of the art is, it's been a few years since I looked at the research). As far as I understand the big advantage of LIDAR is that you get nice and clean depth data and it's not so computationally expensive.