Time of flight distance measurement How cheap can it be ?

LIDAR-Lite: A New Benchmark for Optical Distance Measurement Sensors


This is a great concept. Expensive versions of this are already being done......
http://www-lite.larc.nasa.gov/

The excitement is... how cheap can reliable LIDAR be made ?  Dragon Innovations says it can be under $100.  Sounds really cool.  Questions remain for the techno geek crowd .....

Questions .....

Will this be open source ?  Open source is the best chance for the technology to advance quickly.  More brains will be improving the algorithms and uses and hardware.

Does it require a special chip that will remain proprietary ?    Not much fun if the idea is locked up in proprietary hardware.

Has this been demonstrated to reliable 3rd parties ?  If I am going to invest... I would like to know that credible geeks have seen this prototype work and they feel it is for real.  Most tech sites parrot the claims of the *inventor* and there are questions about how reliable the news from the inventor is.

Tags       #DistanceLTOF      #LEDlidar        99guspuppet