It isn't just diffused over the entire field of view. It's a lot like how CRTs work with the beam scanning over the whole screen line by line. The lidar only needs a very short pulse of light for each given point so it's a lot like taking a laser range finder and just moving it from point to point. Even though it's a very short pulse, the intensity of the light coming back from whatever it hit is exactly the same as if it was shining on it constantly.
If you took a 1W laser and were scanning it back and forth over a 90° by 90° fov it would be impossible to see outside in daylight but if you could take a snapshot of how it looked at any particular instant you would see a single bright dot. All it takes is just long enough to trip the photodetector on to get the delay between light out to reflection received, any additional time shining the laser at that point is just a waste so you can scan a massive number of points many times a second.
Fundamentally, a lidar sensor does not need anything higher intensity than what it can detect when it's scanning a single point.
1. We are talking about a movie projector. Our eyes are the photo detectors and they work very differently to CMOS devices.
1.5, fov does not matter. It's area.
2. As I said, It's true strobed (scanned) lights do look brighter to our eyes than their counterparts for less wattage, but only by a small amount I think.
I stand by my statement, making a movie projector will be hard with this thing because of heat and power requirements.
If you took a 1W laser and were scanning it back and forth over a 90° by 90° fov it would be impossible to see outside in daylight but if you could take a snapshot of how it looked at any particular instant you would see a single bright dot. All it takes is just long enough to trip the photodetector on to get the delay between light out to reflection received, any additional time shining the laser at that point is just a waste so you can scan a massive number of points many times a second.
Fundamentally, a lidar sensor does not need anything higher intensity than what it can detect when it's scanning a single point.