A spontaneous and unrehearsed interview.

Hello and welcome to the 93rd episode of Curiosityness.

I am Travis DeRose, the host of the show that you're listening to right now.

And this episode, we're talking about LiDAR.

And you've probably heard about LiDAR. It's everywhere. It's on all the autonomous cars that use LIDAR. It's coming into the iPhone. I think it's already on the iPad, but it's going to be in the new iPhone. So it's like popping up everywhere. You kind of hear the word LIDAR, but what the hell is LIDAR? That's why I have on Todd Neff.

He is the author of a book called The Laser That's Changing the World,

colon the amazing stories behind LIDAR from 3D mapping to self-driving cars.

So Todd Neff is going to tell us what the hell LIDAR is, and it's freaking awesome.

I think you're really going to love this episode. It's really interesting. LIDAR is basically radar, but with lasers. So it's kind of futuristic. Sounds like it's something Dr. Evil would come up, but it's pretty cool. You've got to have freaking laser beams on here. And it's just fun. We dive into technology the history of it where it came from but then

all the practical uses of it too uh with autonomous cars with the iPhone with scanning the rooms

with augmented reality we talk about why Elon Musk thinks that LiDR is just a crutch for autonomous

cars and you don't really need it but we'll hear what Todd has to say about that so you can make your own judgment. So it's fun. It's for surveying and mapping, all this stuff. Whoa, let's get to the episode. Here's Todd. Todd, how you doing? Thanks for coming on. Travis, how are you? No, thanks for having me. Yeah, heck yeah. Stoke to talk because, I mean, LIDAR is everywhere.

You're starting to hear it. You know, it's, you hear it a while ago. It's on, you know, some autonomous car. Like, what the hell's LIDAR? What does that mean? And now it's on coming on the iPhones, it's on the iPad. so I figured it was about time we learned what the hell this is.

Yeah, totally good timing.

And you're dead right.

Yeah, and it's been around. iPhones on the iPad, so I figured it was about time we learned what the hell this is.

Yeah, totally good timing. And you're dead right. Yeah. And it's been around since the early

1960s. So it's taken just a little while. Yeah. And it's been kind of, I don't know,

stealthy growth from the, from the mass market perspective. But I agree with you once it hits

the iPhone, which, you know, the iPhone 12, according to, and it's, they haven't announced yet, but by all accounts, it looks like it's coming. And there have been some shots of that camera ray in the back. And they've got another little dot there. It went from a triangle to a square. And one of them is a LiDAR, which is a really remarkable thing to be able to squeeze it into that kind of space.

But, you know, pretty cool. Yeah, it's crazy stuff. Okay, so yeah, we'll get into all that stuff, but I think we should just start with kind of the primer of, you know, of what is LIDAR. Can you explain it to us? Yeah, totally. So the basic, the easiest way to think of LIDAR is that it is a

measuring tape that's made of light, right? So if you have a measuring tape, there's a little bit of,

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