Really cool, but really scary, all I see is facial biometrics from 1 km away.
Hello sir, I’m an not from the government and would like to show you something off in the distance for about 3 seconds if you will. Step forward where I’ve carefully marked the street with blue painter’s tape. Do not smile. Did you see it? No? Good!. Well what it is, its ah… Don’t worry about it. Good day sir. What are you talking about? I asked you to step where? I did no such thing. I’m just a normal person living in the city.
Modern tech makes it hard for me to take science fiction seriously anymore that involves humans piloting space fighters, manually aiming weapons, or even being effective on battlefields. We’re rapidly reaching a point where warfare will be strictly in the realm of machines.
Terminator becoming more and more reality every year.
Imagine what they could do with two photons.
Or even phivetons.
that level of detail at 1km is insane. We are so fucked in the machine war.
But Elon thinks camera vision is enough to drive a car.
Well, not to side with the fascist shithead, but you know, “broken clock…”. The thing is, camera vision is kinda enough… It’s an entirely different thing if it could be better, improved, safer, or whatever by adding LiDAR or other tech…
Brother it
HAD LiDAR, they took it away. Tesla customers now pay more for a worse carEDIT: Had RADAR not LiDAR
So, keep in mind that single photon sensors have been around for awhile, in the form of avalanche photodiodes and photomultiplier tubes. And avalanche photodiodes are pretty commonly used in LiDAR systems already.
The ones talked about in the article I linked collect about 50 points per square meter at a horizontal resolution of about 23 cm. Obviously that’s way worse than what’s presented in the phys.org article, but that’s also measuring from 3km away while covering an area of 700 square km per hour (because these systems are used for wide area terrain scanning from airplanes). With the way LiDAR works the system in the phys.org article could be scanning with a very narrow beam to get way more datapoints per square meter.
Now, this doesn’t mean that the system is useless crap or whatever. It could be that the superconducting nanowire sensor they’re using lets them measure the arrival time much more precisely than normal LiDAR systems, which would give them much better depth resolution. Or it could be that the sensor has much less noise (false photon detections) than the commonly used avalanche diodes. I didn’t read the actual paper, and honestly I don’t know enough about LiDAR and photon detectors to really be able to compare those stats.
But I do know enough to say that the range and single-photon capability of this system aren’t really the special parts of it, if it’s special at all.
Only.
…1kilometer only.
Or 1km so far.
Yeah this is crazy stuff.
So, more ways to surveil us? Cool cool cool.
I love LiDAR, there was very limited terrain data from LiDAR available on USGS about a decade ago, just a couple of counties was all, but it was so detailed you could see the shape of Cars on the streets with it.
100 bucks says someone will try and use this on their genitals within the year.
I doubt you’ll find a rube to take that bet.
I thought that was Chris Pratt for a second. And wondering why we wanted a lidar enhanced photo of Chris Pratt’s face from a kilometer away.
