[frizensami]

There's a lot of marketing involved in this naming, with Samsung calling it DepthVision and Apple calling it LIDAR. There may be a difference here, however. My understanding is that Apple LIDAR is doing what we call "direct" ToF, where the round trip travel time of laser pulses is actually measured (this can be in nanoseconds). This lines up with what self driving car (and other expensive) LIDARs do.

Most other ToF sensors use "indirect" ToF, where they measure the phase difference between incoming and outgoing signals to derive distance.

However, it gets murky as cheap 2D LIDARs on say, robot vacuum cleaners, use geometric techniques to find distance (basically return angle of a reflection). I explored this in a previous work.

TLDR: I would recommend not taking any naming at face value and reading the actual datasheet or more commonly, technical marketing materials, since few ToF manufacturers that I see have a public datasheet.