Something Wild Happens When You Try to Take a Video of a Car's Sensors

Public service announcement: don't point your phone camera directly at a lidar sensor. A video recently shared on Reddit demonstrates why. As the camera zooms in on the sensor affixed to the top of a Volvo EX90, a whole galaxy of colorful dots is burned into the image, forming over the exact spot that the flashing light inside the lidar device can be seen. What you're witnessing isn't lens flare or a digital glitch — it's real, physical damage to the camera. And it's permanent. "Lidar lasers burn your camera," the Reddit user warned. Lidar is short for light detection and ranging, and it's become the go-to way for automakers to enable their self-driving cars to "see" their surroundings (unless you're Tesla, that is). The sensors work, essentially, by shooting a constant stream of infrared laser beams to measure the distance to nearby objects, which a computer uses to form a 3D reconstruction of everything in the vicinity of the vehicle. We can't see the laser beams since they're i ... Read full article.