I went down to Advanced Scientific Concepts in Santa Monica, CA, in 2003 to see their prototype flash LIDAR. It was on an optical bench aimed out an overhead door into daylight, nowhere near a product. It did work, but required strange InGaAs semiconductor processes and a timer chip stacked back to back against the sensor chip. Way too expensive to fab.

I thought that was going to be the future, and that technology would get cheap. But it's still expensive to fab such devices.