This is very nice. Phased-array beam steering on both transmit and receive, and coherent detection to ignore any light that's not synced to the transmitter. Now they have to get the range up. If they can get range up to 10m in the near term, that's enough for indoor navigation. That will be useful for VR, AR, robot vacuum cleaners, and similar applications.

I've been expecting the Advanced Scientific Concepts flash LIDAR to be the direction of the future, because it has no moving parts and works in sunlight at range. It just costs too much. But this is potentially even better.