caver.adam wrote:I imagine it will need about the same amount of light as a standard cell phone.
Yes and no: for purposes of cave mapping I suspect you really don't need distinct color channel information, just luminosity, which might give you leeway to work in a bit less light than otherwise. (That said: most cell phone cameras are especially terrible in low light, so, who knows.)
Here's a demo video of it being used in a (well-lit) room, and the resulting 3D detail:
http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/21/54339 ... ject-tangoBased on that, it certainly appears to be capturing enough data points to produce a point cloud that you could get a very serviceable map from.
There are plenty of questions, of course: what's the minimum light level needed for reasonable performance? How much passage can you record in local storage, and how much battery power will it take? Are there ways to mitigate inertial drift enough to get reasonable loop closure? etc.