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Comment by MrLeap | Hacker News Reader

It's a cute package, but that resolution is wild. 24x24? I suppose it might have a place in manufacturing automation tasks.

I don't know where you'd have room for one of these but no room for something like the D435 which has a resolution of 1280 × 720 on the depth side and an RGB sensor. Maybe robotic vacuum cleaners or something.

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These are fundamentally different technologies, the camera you linked uses structured light and stereo vision + ML to get depth. It has an order of magnitude less range and an order of magnitude more error. The Sony sensor is time of flight SPAD, it's much closer to giving you a ground truth you can trust than the Intel camera and much more capable of rejecting environmental noise.

Indeed. Seems much more similar to Intel's RealSense L515, which was a tiny Lidar package. 1024x768@30fps, only 9m range thought; 20m/40m outdoors/indoors sounds impressive! I think mine retailed for like $300 at the time?

Am curious what the applications for this are. Is this for drones? is this for auto-focus and or auto tracking? Thinking of Insta360's new addon for their small gimbal, which adds auto tracking; maybe similar uses? https://www.theverge.com/news/614366/insta360-flow-2-pro-ai-... Sony may not really know to be fair!

On the very low end, I'd mention the very affordable single chip 8x8 pixel 4m depth vl53l5cx. Used by ETH Zurich on a swarm of very lightweight mapping drones! https://www.st.com/en/imaging-and-photonics-solutions/vl53l5... https://hackaday.com/2024/10/11/tiny-drones-do-distributed-m...

It is like a fancy occupancy sensor, 24x24 over that huge volume and only 15fps.

This is still useful if you combine this method with other methods to make depth map more dense and metric e.g. photogrammetry or ML depth estimation model. AFAIK this is how apple depth api works with their lidar.

Here bytedance release very good model that combine their depth anything v2 with such low density apple lidar depth map: https://promptda.github.io/

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