The lidar on the phones suck (I had one and was super disappointed). It has a range of like half a room, terrible resolution, was slow as heck, and the software

The lidar on the phones suck (I had one and was super disappointed). It has a range of like half a room, terrible resolution, was slow as heck, and the software was buggy and unstable and the algorithms often butchered all but the simplest scans. It's not like you put the phone on the tripod and you get a Ubisoft-like cave in a minute. It's like you get half the room at 20% fidelity after an hour of frustration. Honestly the more mature photogrammetry techniques that stitch together multiple photos (from video or 360 shots taken successively) seemed much more impressive. Indeed, you can run most of the same apps with lidar off and still get similar results. There is a lot of depth info when you take pictures from different angles that a smart algorithm can figure out. The lidar adds more hinting but without professional grade equipment, the optical sensors (cameras) are much higher resolution and range. The lidars on the i devices are cheap gimmicks. Edit: just to add a bit more detail, lidar basically gets you a point cloud of depth data. The professional ones have big spinning mirrors that blanket the room in a matrix of powerful dots, like a Kinect on steroids. That takes a lot of power and, usually, moving parts. The iPhone one uses more modern, smaller solid state technology but has a resolution of a few hundred dots and a range of 5m, vs the millions of pixels on the optical camera and a range of however much ambient light you have. The lidar is an active emitter. It has to produce its own laser light, limited by its emitters and battery, and have a way to scan its emissions across 2d space (x and y axes) or else have a ton of micro lasers in a grid. By comparison the optical camera is just a passive receiver, accepting reflected sunlight or light from the the weak LED flash. Those light sources are way stronger and more diffuse in terms of range and coverage. Maybe in a few years the lidar will get better but for now it's just not useful for anything except face ID. Prosumer drones probably have better lidar and also better photogrammetry software. More deets on i lidar: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/the-technology-behind-the-iphone-lidar-may-be-coming-soon-to-cars/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/the-technology-behind-t...