What are new applications enabled by such 3D sensors?

  • Many applications will benefit from these VIZTA project outcomes.
    Imagine tiny and affordable sensors that give you the X, Y and Z position of many thousands of points in the scene and think about the numerous possible usages.
    Depending on the targeted Z range (distance), we can name a few of those usages:
    Short range (under 1 meter): Face recognition, Gesture control, Driver monitoring, Industrial control…
    Few meters: Smart buildings, Mobile robots, Drones, Security…
    Medium/Long range (few tens of meters to few hundred meters): Security of transport with LIDARs (Light based radars with much higher resolution)

 

 

What about societal impacts, gains for people?

  • VIZTA project intends to provide some positive impacts on the society. About individuals security, these 3D sensors technology will enable decentralized local accurate capture of scene where there is a potential danger (for instance, close to a car or a robot), rather than global 2D imaging systems acquiring huge amount of data with very few relevant ones.
    Concerning digital privacy rights, VIZTA will include GDPR compliancy studies and will push to maximize individuals control over the generated data from this new technology.

 

 

What about technical challenges?

  • Several technical challenges will be tackled by VIZTA project, the principle used in such 3D sensors being the emission and reception of Infra-Red light.
    At the emission level, VIZTA has to find solutions to generate the right emission beams in duration, amplitude, direction with minimum power consumption and size and in compliance to safety rules.
    At the reception level, challenges are to detect very small amplitude echoed light and distinguish these echoes from the enormous number of photons of the ambient light.
    Emission and reception must also be precisely synchronized to perform distance measurement by measuring Time of Flight between emission and reception.
    To overcome these challenges, dedicated semi-conductor electro-optical devices technologies developments with new architectures of circuits and software, including some AI as well as optical innovative solutions will be conducted and demonstrated during the VIZTA project.