> They also have the potential to be much more robust because of the lack of moving parts, with a non-mechanical beam steering 1,000 times faster than what is currently achieved in mechanical lidar systems.
The LIDAR chips don't use visible light, but the article talks about it as a future project:
> We are also developing visible light phased arrays with applications such as Li-Fi and holography that can be seen by the human eye.
It's a very simple, and very clever mechanism, too. My first guess was that they were going to use piezo mechanisms to squish cavities, but heat is even simpler.
Yes, but your issues will be power output and heat.
My projector is 250 watts and has a ton of cooling due to the light source and is still not all that bright. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to cool a 250 watt light source coming from a .3mm source. Probably impossible for the foreseeable future.
Maybe microfluidic tubes would make it work. But then you have to have watercooling.
It really dependson efficiency. Which I dont recall reading about in the ardicle. Or wait, did they say -6db loss I think? That would still be a ton of heat.
Either way, I don't think this will be the breakthrough we need. Lenses are one of the cheaper components in a projector.
It doesn't need anywhere near that much power. Each pulse is only a microsecond long and since it's all focused in a single beam it takes very little power. Even just a 1 W laser can be seen for miles and it can be a big hazard for pilots because people will try to shine them at the cockpit windows. Heat will definitely be manageable.
It isn't just diffused over the entire field of view. It's a lot like how CRTs work with the beam scanning over the whole screen line by line. The lidar only needs a very short pulse of light for each given point so it's a lot like taking a laser range finder and just moving it from point to point. Even though it's a very short pulse, the intensity of the light coming back from whatever it hit is exactly the same as if it was shining on it constantly.
If you took a 1W laser and were scanning it back and forth over a 90° by 90° fov it would be impossible to see outside in daylight but if you could take a snapshot of how it looked at any particular instant you would see a single bright dot. All it takes is just long enough to trip the photodetector on to get the delay between light out to reflection received, any additional time shining the laser at that point is just a waste so you can scan a massive number of points many times a second.
Fundamentally, a lidar sensor does not need anything higher intensity than what it can detect when it's scanning a single point.
1. We are talking about a movie projector. Our eyes are the photo detectors and they work very differently to CMOS devices.
1.5, fov does not matter. It's area.
2. As I said, It's true strobed (scanned) lights do look brighter to our eyes than their counterparts for less wattage, but only by a small amount I think.
I stand by my statement, making a movie projector will be hard with this thing because of heat and power requirements.
