What are possible applications for wide range time of flight measurement?

In the course of a university project we are currently involved in a new technology that captures environments and creates 3D models thereof. In particular, the technology offers the following benefits:

- Captures large areas of up to 32x32ft (or 10x10m)
- Offers precision of 0.03" (or 1mm)
- Detects motions in real-time with up to 1000fps (Response time: 1ms)

- Offers resolution of 640x480 (VGA)
- Works independent of light (both bright and dark light conditions)

- Is resistent to interference due to HDDM (High Definition Distance Measurement)

- Is portable (0.8"x0.8")

- Consumes low power (50mW-500mW)
- Captures an angle of 180°; when combining two modules 360° would be possible.

What application fields / problems could be relevant that would require operating in such large areas, at given precision and time resolution? We would be highly interested in applications or problems with focus on a rather large group of users.

Thank you in advance for your support!

Your thread title made me think of the mass spectrometry technique. But, yeah, I'm not sure I completely understand the device you're describing, but it sounds like it could model some sort of 3D chromatography well. Precisely capturing the movement of things that travel at slightly different rates over long distances relative to their size and whatnot. You could take things that travel at different rates under different driving forces at right angles to each other and sort them.

That is, if it's modelling software. If it gathers the data of actual real world spaces, that would be a different thing entirely. Flight patterns of bees, maybe? Or schools of fish? Tracking light objects in tornadoes (tiny tornadoes). Flow patterns of particulates traveling in fluids in sealed pipes?

It's certainly an interesting sounding piece of technology, though.

Thanks for all your interesting ideas...they really sound great!

@Barzai: the sensor is a infrared TOF 3D chip. At the moment we do not limit the technology to any type of application field but are curious to get to know your ideas and/or about how you would assess the potential of the technology.

To your point of view, what makes this technology most interesting or unique?

Wow, I just looked that up, and I didn't realize just how much data that can gather at once. I see why you're posting about it on a gaming forum. One or 2 of those would make for a super-accurate 3d kinect type system like slicer said. Or, if you could translate the data into the visible spectrum and project the images it captures on room walls somehow, you could immerse a person in a remote environment pretty accurately I'd imagine.

It could be useful in hazardous environments. It might make life easier on folks working at refineries and sewage treatment plants if they could gather that much data remotely without having to put on environmental protection suits. Maybe track mixing patterns in sealed reactors?

I don't know how much power solar panels can generate, but if they could power a unit and a transmitter remote sensing stations could be deployed. An array of those could track movements in large chunks of wilderness areas. You could actually track the flight patterns of bees in orchards for optimizing pollination or somesuch. That might get expensive, though.

You could make automated security grids. If you can accurately detect the location of something you can point a gun at it and shoot it.

Yeah, lots of possibilities.

Thank you a lot for all these great and interesting ideas. These are very valuable contributions to our project.

We are especially interested in mass markets. Technical specifications can still be changed since the development of the technology is not finished yet. Are there any further problems that could be potentially solved using this technology?

Thanks in advance!