Five Lidar Megatrends Driving Adoption

June 13, 2023
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Updated February 9, 2026
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2 min read

3D LiDAR point cloud visualization showing vehicles and landmarks with speed data in an urban environment.
It’s easy to lose sight of the big picture when, as a team, you’re focused on delivering short-term and concrete LiDAR software solutions to dozens of customers in a variety of industries, frequently adding new features (and fixing some bugs!): so let’s take a step back for a second and look at five lidar megatrends shaping the industry.

From the Outsight blog.

We’re witnessing the convergence of five long-term drivers propelling the advancement of 3D perception technologies.

[Internal and LiDAR-specific trends such as commoditisation of hardware and the rise of software are correlated to these but are not the subject of this article – look at this one instead]
1. People and Goods’ flow Intelligence (while maintaining privacy)

Operators of both public and private spaces are under increasing pressure to ensure that people and products can move as efficiently as possible while simultaneously respecting the growing concerns for privacy.

For example, one of the major topics in the context of Smart City management is monitoring, understanding, and predicting city user behaviour (hottest places, trajectories, flows, and so on), so the delivery of city services can be improved (security, clean, transport,..).

When used in private spaces, the goal is also frequently to improve operational efficiency, as demonstrated in one of our customers’ premises, where thousands of people are anonymously tracked in real time:

3D point cloud visualization showing various objects in a LiDAR data analysis software interface.


In the vast majority of cases, Personal Identification data is not really required because the questions to be answered are mostly about “where,” “when,” and “how many / how long,” and not so much about “who” (in the sense of an individual person).

The need is to provide Spatial Intelligence: 3D LiDAR sensing (and soon Imaging Radar) provide the ideal raw data that can be processed by the right software to turn it into insightful and actionable information.

Unlike 2D images, these 3D natives sensors cannot capture personal identification information. They are a native privacy respectful solution:

For the complete article on five lidar megatrends CLICK HERE.

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About The Author

Gene Roe - founder of Lidar News

Alluxa optical coatings

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