Apple announced a new iPad Pro yesterday, and one of the biggest additions was a new LIDAR system on the rear camera, which Apple argued was the missing piece for revolutionary augmented reality applications.

LIDAR — which stands for “Light Detection and Ranging” — isn’t a new technology. Driverless cars in particular have been relying on the laser sensors for years to detect objects and build 3D maps of their surroundings in near real time as a way of “seeing” other cars, trees, and roads.

Apple’s miniaturized scanner isn’t quite at that level, but the company says that it’ll be able to measure the distance to objects over 16 feet away (or five meters). It claims that by combining the depth information from the LIDAR scanner with…

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