Ouster’s new color lidar is coming to replace cameras

Source: TechCrunch

The push for combined lidar‑camera sensors

The tech industry has spent the last decade debating whether self‑driving cars need lidar sensors, cameras, or both. Ouster says its answer is to put them together in a single sensor.

On Monday, the San Francisco‑based company announced a new lineup of lidar sensors called Rev8, all of which offer “native color lidar.” These sensors capture color imagery and three‑dimensional depth information simultaneously, doing the work of two sensors in one.

“For all of human history, it’s been: you buy a lidar sensor, you buy a camera, and you try to make sense of the combination with some higher‑level reasoning, and waste an enormous amount of time doing this,” Ouster CEO Angus Pacala told TechCrunch. “The goal is to obviate cameras. There’s no reason that one sensor can’t do both.”

Rev8 lineup and capabilities

• OS1 Max – marketed as “the industry’s best long‑range lidar,” capable of seeing up to 500 m in all directions while being smaller than competing long‑range units.
• OS0, OS1, and OSDome – other models built on the Rev8 platform (per the press release).

The sensors deliver:

• 48‑bit color with 116 dB dynamic range
• Megapixel‑level resolution
• Pre‑fused 3D colorized point clouds, with the option to use raw lidar data, raw camera data, or the combined stream

Pacala noted that Ouster has already shipped samples to existing customers and is now taking orders.

Underlying technology

Ouster employs a digital lidar architecture that captures lidar information directly on a custom chip using single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detectors, rather than relying on analog moving‑part designs. The same SPAD technology is used to capture color image data in the Rev8 sensors, giving the image capture greater sensitivity than a conventional camera.

“It’s 48‑bit color, 116 dB of dynamic range, like megapixel resolution. These are top‑line numbers that make it pound‑for‑pound a good camera. But it just so happens it’s coming as a pre‑fused data stream as a 3D colorized point cloud,” Pacala explained.

Market context

The Rev8 launch arrives amid a wave of consolidation in the lidar sector—Ouster’s acquisition of Velodyne and Luminar’s recent asset sale (see TechCrunch article). At the same time, demand for sensors is exploding as companies like Waymo scale robotaxi fleets and robotics firms (humanoid and industrial) seek advanced perception hardware. New entrants such as Boston‑based Teradar are exploring alternative modalities, including terahertz imaging (TechCrunch article).

Competitive landscape

• Hesai recently announced its own color lidar platform, promising mass production by the end of the year (Hesai press release).
• Innoviz and other companies have previously pitched their versions of “color lidar.”

Pacala argues that many competitors are merely packaging separate lidar and camera modules together, whereas Ouster (and Hesai) integrate both functions on the same chip. This integration reduces the workload for customers who would otherwise need to calibrate and fuse disparate data streams, and it paves the way for eventually eliminating separate cameras altogether—while also being cheaper and smaller than previous Ouster technology.

“This is kind of fundamentally changing the value proposition of what we’re selling to a customer from this stage forward,” Pacala told TechCrunch.