Three research communities, three funding streams, three separate literatures. A sensor that could exist has been proposed for nine years and nobody has built it, because the people with the answers don’t read each other’s work.

A jumping spider’s depth perception system has been modeled, validated, and explicitly proposed as the blueprint for a sensor cheaper than LIDAR and simpler than stereo vision. Every physical primitive exists in a fab. So why hasn’t anyone built it?

A jumping spider with fewer than 100,000 neurons plans hour-long hunting routes, learns from experience, rotates mental images, and deceives its prey — challenging everything we thought intelligence required.