alt Hacker NewsYour eyes will be fine (assuming that we are talking about automotive LiDAR specifically).
Automotive LiDAR is designed to meet Class-1 laser eye-safety standard, which means "safe under normal conditions." It isn't some subjective/marketing thing, it is an official laser safety classification that is very regulated.
However, if you try to break that "normal conditions" rule by pressing your eyeball directly against an automotive LiDAR sensor for a very long period of time while it is blasting, you might cause yourself some damage.
The reason for why your phone camera would get damaged, but not your eyes, is due to the nature of how camera lenses work. They are designed to gather as much light as possible from a direction and focus it onto a flat, tiny sensor. The same LiDAR beam that is spread out for a large retina can become hyper-concentrated onto a handful of pixels through the camera optics.
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I looked this up for a laser-based projector, Class 2 is "blink reflex should protect you" and "don't be a doofus and stare into it for a long time". Look up the classifications on the google and you'll see other things like "don't look into the rays with a set of binoculars" and stuff.
Class 1 is pretty darned safe, but if you're continually bathed by 50 passing cars an hour while walking on a sidewalk... pitch it to a PhD student you know as something they should find or run a study on.
What about if you're walking or biking next to congested motorway and most of the vehicles have LiDAR running at the same time? That's a lot of photons.
This is inconsistent with the basic concept. It’s projecting and reading lasers . By default some emissions will hit people in the eye. Even invisible light can damage tissue , especially in the eye
Why wouldn’t your eye lens focus LIDAR photons from the same source onto a small region of your retina in the same way that a phone camera lens focuses same-origin photos to a few pixels?
Sorry if this is a silly question, I honestly don’t have the greatest understanding of EM.