this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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That's a bad idea. You don't want to get a stranger, or yourself in the eye.
Anything that would do meaningful damage to a camera sensor will easily do that to human eyeballs if it refracts or gets reflected.
Especially for cheaper high-power lasers, which may not properly filter out invisible wavelengths like IR.
I don't think that's true? The lidars on Waymo have been known to damage camera sensors but are safe to the eyes. By damage, like a pixel or two go out, but that's from a random hit. If you did it right you could do more damage.
Interesting. I would have expected cameras to be more resilient between both their internal filters and the sensor material being tougher than human eyeballs, so anything that could overwhelm that and burn out a camera sensor would be able to ruin someone's vision almost instantly.
This says its about the specific wave lengths and our eyes are okay with the ones bad for cameras
https://www.faceofit.com/lidar-camera-sensor-damage/
If I hadn't heard of this happening before though I wouldn't have guessed this to be the case.