Ouster's REV8 is a native color lidar sensor that captures RGB color and 3D depth…

Brief

Ouster's REV8 is a native color lidar sensor that captures RGB color and 3D depth on the same silicon chip, so each point in its scans is intrinsically color-aligned. Reported by @kimmonismus on 2026-05-09, REV8 removes the need for separate cameras and software fusion, which the author says lowers latency, alignment errors, and complexity.

First Native Color Lidar Sensor by Ouster (REV8), where color and 3D data are fused in silicon and not in software.

Traditional lidar sensors capture 3D point clouds of the environment (distance/depth data) but only in monochrome, no color information. To get color, you’d typically need to fuse lidar data with a separate RGB camera in software, which introduces latency, alignment errors, and added complexity.

Ouster’s REV8 does something different: it captures both color and 3D depth data on the same silicon chip, meaning every single point in the 3D scan natively carries color information without needing a separate camera or post-processing software fusion. The color and depth are inherently aligned at the hardware level.

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