LIDAR will almost always be a better option when you don't have particulate matter that obstructs the beam because you can measure the distances directly which

LIDAR will almost always be a better option when you don't have particulate matter that obstructs the beam because you can measure the distances directly which vastly reduces latency. Round trip time to a remote server means you have already lost and also introduced some very nasty failure modes. This is the reason why valve uses a LIDAR like system for Lighthouse rather than try to do image processing like on the kinect.