They are roughly comparable with results from photogrammetry at a fraction of the capture/processing time. Have you seen much raw photogrammetry output? Before it's been repaired/cleaned-up? You can get better than this with photogrammetry but it takes a lot of time and trial and error. This stuff is as good as my personal attempts at photogrammetry and in some cases better. When photogrammetry fails it generally fails catastrophically. With LIDAR you will always get something.

I think we generally agree. I'm just saying it's not good enough to take into a cave and casually scan it into a 3d model yet, not with the cheap consumer tech at least. I don't think those results are usable for anything (games, sharing, measurements, mapping), just novelty.

Actually I don't think we do agree. "Novelty" is a very low bar and I'm arguing that there's plenty of utility above and beyond that.

Measurement? Yes - it's accurate enough for many purposes like home furnishing and interior design mockups.

Games? Yes. It suffers from similar issues to photogrammetry (high poly count, need for repair and cleanup) but that's proved useful in many aspects of game content creation. There's also the fact that games are a creative medium and people develop new art styles all the time. There's some very creative uses of point clouds and 3d volumetric capture which is often glitchy as hell.

Sharing? Not sure what you mean.

Mapping? It's much better quality than the 3d meshes in Google Maps and they are incredibly useful for visualising and inspecting places you can't visit. Compare with the output from drone photogrammetry. This plugs a gap between large scale mapping via drones and laser site scans. It's better than the former and cheaper than the latter.

OK, then we disagree.