Tech

Ouster’s new color lidar is coming to replace cameras

Published

3 months ago

May 4, 2026

The tech industry has spent the last decade asking whether self-driving cars need lidar sensors, cameras, or all of the above. Lidar company Ouster says it has a new answer: put them both in the same sensor.

On Monday, the San Francisco-based company announced a new lineup of lidar sensors it calls “Rev8,” all of which offer so-called “native color lidar.” These sensors are capable of capturing color imagery and three-dimensional depth information at the same time, doing the work of two sensors in one.

Ouster CEO Angus Pacala said the development has been a decade in the making at his company, and he wasn’t shy about his ambitions for the new product lineup in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, calling it the “holy grail of what a roboticist has always wanted.”

“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,” he told TechCrunch. “And companies only get really halfway there in terms of calibrating and fusing the data streams.”

Ouster’s new sensors, he said, change this equation.

“The goal is to obviate cameras. There’s no reason that one sensor can’t do both,” he said.

The Rev8 lineup arrives at a dynamic moment for lidar companies. There has been a years-long wave of consolidation happening, with Ouster buying Velodyne, and Luminar’s assets recently getting acquired in bankruptcy.

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At the same time, the market for sensors is exploding. Waymo and others have finally deployed working robotaxis and are scaling quickly. Robotics companies — humanoid and industrial — are hoovering up investment dollars and need sensors to perceive the world. There’s so much interest in the space that new companies like Boston-based Teradar are popping up and testing the waters with entirely new modalities. (In Teradar’s case, it’s using terahertz imaging.)

A color lidar that combines pinpoint depth information with camera-quality image data could be especially valuable to the robotics players, Pacala said. And he said Ouster worked with Fujifilm and image science company DXOMARK to understand “what it means to build a great camera.”

In fact, Pacala claims Ouster’s color lidar is “improving in many ways on a modern camera” thanks to the way the company already designs and builds its sensors.

Ouster uses so-called “digital lidar” architecture. Instead of the analog approach, which involves many moving parts, Ouster captures the lidar info directly on its custom chip using what’s known as single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detectors.

The company is using this same SPAD technology to capture the color image data in the Rev8 sensors. Pacala said this novel technique allows its image capture to be more sensitive than a normal camera.

“It’s 48-bit color, 116 dB of dynamic range, like mega pixel resolution. These are top line numbers that make it pound for pound good camera. But it just so happens it’s coming as a pre-fused data stream as a 3D colorized point cloud,” he said. “You can actually use the data as a camera stream as well, but it’s that’s one of the powers of this system, is you can use just the lidar data stream, you can use just the camera data stream, or you can use the pre-fused data stream, depending on how kind of forward-thinking your perception team is.”

Pacala said his company has already shipped samples to existing customers and that it’s now taking orders. He said he’s particularly proud of the OS1 Max sensor, which he said he considers to be “the industry’s best long range lidar.” It can see 500 meters in all directions and is smaller than other long range lidar “by a big margin.”

“We’ve had a long range LiDAR, but it hasn’t been just like clearly a cut above everything else,” he said. “That’s a big leap for Ouster. I think it means that we’ll start to see it much more on high-speed robo-trucking, robotaxi applications, I think a lot of drone stuff will transition to the OS1 Max.”

Other new lidars built on the Rev8 platform will include the OS0, OS1, and OSDome, according to a press release.

Ouster isn’t the only company that has started talking about color lidar. Last month, Chinese company Hesai announced its own color lidar platform that it says will enter mass production by the end of this year. Other companies, like Innoviz, have previously pitched their own takes on “color lidar.”

Pacala says most other players trying to “fuse” cameras and lidar sensors are basically packaging them together in a box, though. The approach Ouster (and, to be fair, Hesai) is taking is putting the lidar and imaging tech on the same chip.

This dramatically cuts down on the amount of work Ouster’s customers have to do to make sense of the competing sensor streams, Pacala said, and it also sets those customers up to eventually eschew cameras altogether — all while being cheaper and smaller than Ouster’s previous technology.

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

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Tech

Social media platforms still facing thousands of user addiction lawsuits after failed appeals

Published

21 minutes ago

August 10, 2026

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Social media companies like Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google are facing a long road of litigation over claims that they intentionally designed their products to be addictive to minors.

According to a report from Reuters, San Francisco’s 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied these platforms’ attempt to defend themselves from thousands of lawsuits through an argument based on Section 230, which protects publishers and platforms from being held liable for users’ posts. The companies argued that Section 230 could also protect them from the claim that they did not warn the public about addictive design choices, but the court said the appeal may have come too soon, since this type of appeal usually arrives after a trial.

These thousands of lawsuits, which come from private individuals, state and local governments, and school districts, were consolidated into one federal suit and will proceed as such.

It’s too early to say how these addictive design lawsuits will pan out, but so far, Meta lost two lawsuits over similar issues, marking the first time that the platform was held liable over child safety concerns in jury trials.

Tech

Aptoide becomes the first rival app store to return to Google Play in the US

Published

29 minutes ago

August 10, 2026

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Competing Android app stores are now back on Google Play in the U.S., and Aptoide is the first to take advantage of the new option. On Monday, the Portugal-based app distributor brought its games store back to Google Play after more than a decade, crediting the loosening of restrictions that had been criticized as anticompetitive.

For the first time in many years, U.S. users will be able to install a competitor to Google’s Android app store directly from Google Play itself, a milestone in terms of opening the app market to more competition.

Aptoide’s independent app store is one of the larger Android app marketplaces outside of Google Play, offering more than 40,000 Android applications to its roughly 25 million monthly active users. The U.S. has been Aptoide’s largest market to date, but until now, the store had to be sideloaded on Android devices, limiting its reach.

That changed following U.S. District Judge James Donato’s ruling in the Epic Games lawsuit, which, among other things, now requires Google to allow the installation of third-party apps from outside the Play Store. As of June 22, 2026, Google began allowing third-party app stores to access Google Play’s app catalog through the Play Catalog Access Program. This allows competitors to access Google Play infrastructure, including its catalog of apps that can be offered to users, while remaining an independent store.

Epic Games first sued Google in 2020, alleging anticompetitive abuses in the Android app ecosystem. A jury trial ruled in Epic’s favor in 2023. Google appealed the ruling, but lost. Earlier this year, the comapny said it would drop Play Store commissions and make it easier for Android users to install alternative app stores.

Tech

YouTube now requires creators to have twice as many watch hours to start earning money

Published

37 minutes ago

August 10, 2026

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YouTube announced on Monday that new creators will have to meet higher thresholds to begin earning money from ads and subscriptions.

Creators who want to start earning on the platform will need at least 8,000 qualified watch hours over the past year or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days. Currently, creators need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours over the past year or 1,000 subscribers and 10 million Shorts views over the past 90 days.

The change is going into effect starting February 1. The Google-owned company says the update won’t impact creators already in the YouTube Partner Program.

Additionally, YouTube announced that creators will need to maintain 10 million Shorts views over a 90-day period to earn money through the Shorts Creators Pool. Channels below this threshold will remain in the partner program and continue earning on long-form content, with Shorts revenue resuming once they cross 10 million views again.

YouTube says the changes are being introduced to “keep pace with the growth of YouTube, which now sees over 200 billion daily Shorts views and over a billion hours of watch time on TV” every day.

The changes make it harder for creators to enter and remain in YouTube’s monetization program, especially for Shorts creators. By increasing thresholds, YouTube is putting more pressure on creators’ ability to consistently bring in large audiences before being able to earn money on the platform, which could in turn lead to fewer new entrants being able to monetize their content.

As part of Monday’s announcement, YouTube announced that it’s expanding its more affordable Premium Lite subscription to all countries where YouTube Premium is available. Creators receive a share of subscription revenue based on member watch time and views, with 55% going to long-form video creators and 45% to Shorts creators.

“With these additional subscribers, creators can expect higher earnings: when a user signs up for Premium, partners, on average, earn more than when the user was watching ads,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Premium Lite offers an ad-free experience on most videos, along with the ability to download videos for offline viewing and play videos in the background.

YouTube isn’t the only social media company revising its creator rewards programs. Over the weekend, Elon Musk’s X also revamped creator payouts by changing its guidelines to only reward original content. Earlier this spring, Facebook also launched a new monetization program to attract creators from TikTok and YouTube.

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