An energy-efficient adaptive 3D sensing system. The adaptive 3D sensing system includes one or more cameras and one or more projectors. The adaptive 3D sensing system captures images of a real-world scene using the one or more cameras and computes depth estimates and depth estimate confidence values for pixels of the images. The adaptive 3D sensing system computes an attention mask based on the one or more depth estimate confidence values and commands the one or more projectors to send a distributed laser beam into one or more areas of the real-world scene based on the attention mask. The adaptive 3D sensing system captures 3D sensing image data of the one or more areas of the real-world scene and generates 3D sensing data for the real-world scene based on the 3D sensing image data.