On Friday, September 30, 2016 at 7:22:36 AM UTC-7, wrote:
On Thursday, September 29, 2016 at 10:50:59 PM UTC-7, Craig Funston wrote:
Motion of particles in the air

Not saying you are wrong, but what lidar unit can detect particles in the air? And from the CEO “I can see what you’re doing with your fingers at 100 meters,” is a statement with obvious intentions to decieve and confuse. "Seeing" is not a word I would associate with lidar, particularly real time. And a 30 hz lidar unit (did they mean 30 khz on their website?) "see's" nothing. Lidar gives you dots in space and their relative relation to each other and the lidar source, then those dots need to be interpreted to give the needed information. Maybe they are doing amazing interpretation, hard to tell from the website. But a 30 hz (or even a 30 khz) lidar gives very, very few data points, particularly from a moving car. So the system is interpreting something from that data to give information of some type, but this is nothing like seeing or vision as we would typically think of it. But it sounds good.
Not to be confused, the self driving car is on it's way and will dramatically change transportation, but that's not really a lidar issue.
And, more to the point of the thread, seeing thermals would change the sport, but would it lessen the fun in any way?

I interpret that what they are meaning by 30 Hz is a scene update rate of 30 Hz. That would actually seem much faster than needed for the glider application and would therefore offer a potential for integration over time to improve energy gathering. Remember also that the glider application has no need of resolving individual bugs. We're interested in net signal over a largish volume of space which again provides an integration opportunity over az, el and r.