“We’re making iPad even more capable and versatile by bringing trackpad support to iPadOS,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. Combined with the eight-core CPU and the powerful Neural Engine, which enables next-generation apps, there’s no other chip that can offer the incredible performance found in the thin and light design of iPad Pro.
8 cool ways to use LiDAR on your iPhone and iPad
Built directly into the device, the Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) scanner emits a laser to more accurately measure distances of surrounding objects, a benefit that plays out in a couple of different ways. First, LiDAR helps the camera take sharper photos, especially in dark conditions.
Nestled among the rear cameras, the scanner can detect objects up to 5 meters, or 16.5 inches.
Under those conditions, the LiDAR scanner detects the distance of your subject, allowing your camera to more quickly rev up the autofocus.
Apple claims that the LiDAR sensor helps the camera autofocus as much as six times faster, an advantage when you have to take the shot before it’s too late. Tilt your device horizontally or vertically along a surface until the screen turns to 0 and flashes green to indicate that you’re level.
Looking for a new desk, chair, table, or other piece of furniture and wondering how it would look and fit in your home? Start by browsing or searching for a specific piece of furniture or other item, including chairs, beds, desks, sofas, lamps, mirrors, clocks, dressers, or bookcases.
After signing up for a free account, start a new home project, give it a name, and then kick off your scan. Need a new pair of prescription glasses or sunglasses but want to check out some options before you head to the store?
After launching the app, tap one of the icons at the bottom for the item you want described, choosing among short text, a document, a product, a person, currency, or a scene. Tap the shutter button, and the app displays and speaks a description of the item.
If you want to capture a 3D image of an object in the real world, Scaniverse – 3D Scanner is an effective tool. Fire up the app, tap the shutter button, and then select the size of the object you want to scan — small, medium, or large.
Angry Birds AR: Isle of Pigs offers a twist on the usual Angry Birds gameplay by letting you overlay a virtual island of piggies in the real world and then aim your slingshot to take down their buildings. Choose the room, pick your mechanical champion, and let the match begin. Strive toward victory by building and customizing your bot and tapping into the right abilities in the heat of the battle. But the AR element here is that the robots are bursting through your wall as you struggle to get them before they steal your magic crystal of power. A fun game for adults and kids alike is Alice in Wonderland AR quest. In this one, a portal is opened in your room that takes you to Wonderland where you meet the White Rabbit, throw a tea party, and solve puzzles.
8 cool ways to use LiDAR on your iPhone and iPad
Built directly into the device, the Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) scanner emits a laser to more accurately measure distances of surrounding objects, a benefit that plays out in a couple of different ways. First, LiDAR helps the camera take sharper photos, especially in dark conditions. Nestled among the rear cameras, the scanner can detect objects up to 5 meters, or 16.5 inches. Under those conditions, the LiDAR scanner detects the distance of your subject, allowing your camera to more quickly rev up the autofocus.
Apple claims that the LiDAR sensor helps the camera autofocus as much as six times faster, an advantage when you have to take the shot before it’s too late. Tilt your device horizontally or vertically along a surface until the screen turns to 0 and flashes green to indicate that you’re level. Looking for a new desk, chair, table, or other piece of furniture and wondering how it would look and fit in your home? Start by browsing or searching for a specific piece of furniture or other item, including chairs, beds, desks, sofas, lamps, mirrors, clocks, dressers, or bookcases. After signing up for a free account, start a new home project, give it a name, and then kick off your scan.
Need a new pair of prescription glasses or sunglasses but want to check out some options before you head to the store? After launching the app, tap one of the icons at the bottom for the item you want described, choosing among short text, a document, a product, a person, currency, or a scene. Tap the shutter button, and the app displays and speaks a description of the item.
If you want to capture a 3D image of an object in the real world, Scaniverse – 3D Scanner is an effective tool. Fire up the app, tap the shutter button, and then select the size of the object you want to scan — small, medium, or large. Angry Birds AR: Isle of Pigs offers a twist on the usual Angry Birds gameplay by letting you overlay a virtual island of piggies in the real world and then aim your slingshot to take down their buildings. Choose the room, pick your mechanical champion, and let the match begin.
Strive toward victory by building and customizing your bot and tapping into the right abilities in the heat of the battle. But the AR element here is that the robots are bursting through your wall as you struggle to get them before they steal your magic crystal of power. A fun game for adults and kids alike is Alice in Wonderland AR quest. In this one, a portal is opened in your room that takes you to Wonderland where you meet the White Rabbit, throw a tea party, and solve puzzles.
Lidar is one of the iPhone and iPad Pro’s coolest tricks: Here’s what else it can do
That’s the lidar sensor, and it delivers a new type of depth-sensing that can make a difference in photos, AR, 3D scanning and possibly even more. Some other smartphones measure depth with a single light pulse, whereas a smartphone with this type of lidar tech sends waves of light pulses out in a spray of infrared dots and can measure each one with its sensor, creating a field of points that map out distances and can “mesh” the dimensions of a space and the objects in it. The idea’s the same: Apple’s Face ID-enabling TrueDepth camera also shoots out an array of infrared lasers, but can only work up to a few feet away.
Augmented reality headsets like the HoloLens 2 have similar tech, mapping out room spaces before layering 3D virtual objects into them.
Time-of-flight cameras on smartphones tend to be used to improve focus accuracy and speed, and the iPhone 12 Pro did the same. Lidar allows the iPhone and iPad Pros to start AR apps a lot more quickly, and build a fast map of a room to add more detail.
I’ve been testing it out on an Apple Arcade game, Hot Lava, which already uses lidar to scan a room and all its obstacles. Expect a lot more AR apps that will start adding lidar support like this for richer experiences.
Many companies are dreaming of headsets that will blend virtual objects and real ones: AR glasses, being worked on by Facebook, Qualcomm, Snapchat, Microsoft, Magic Leap and most likely Apple and others, will rely on having advanced 3D maps of the world to layer virtual objects onto. But there’s a possibility that people’s own devices could eventually help crowdsource that info, or add extra on-the-fly data.
A 3D room scan from Occipital’s Canvas app, enabled by depth-sensing lidar on the iPad Pro. Lidar can be used to mesh out 3D objects and rooms and layer photo imagery on top, a technique called photogrammetry.
The 16-foot effective range of lidar’s scanning is enough to reach across most rooms in my house, but in bigger outdoor spaces it takes more moving around. Google had this same idea in mind when Project Tango — an early AR platform that was only on two phones — was created. Google’s Tango-equipped phones were short-lived, replaced by computer vision algorithms that have done estimated depth sensing on cameras without needing the same hardware.
The Best LiDAR Apps for Your iPhone and iPad
With the LiDAR scanner, you can better measure yourself for clothes shopping, your home for buying new furniture, and your surroundings for imaging scanning. Companies like Apple, Ikea, and Microsoft have apps that can measure a person’s height, position virtual 3D furniture, and identify nearby people and objects. Measure distance by positioning the center dot within the circle onto the starting point, then tap the + button. You can then position your device flat, horizontally, or vertically along a surface until the screen displays 0 and turns green to indicate that you are level.
Choose from a variety of items, including chairs, sofas, tables, desks, bookcases, and lamps. Designed by Microsoft, the free Seeing AI app is geared toward helping blind and visually impaired people navigate through their environment.
Thanks to the power of artificial intelligence, the app can describe people, scenes, and objects that appear in the viewfinder. With its LiDAR support, Seeing AI can help you feel the distance to objects based on your device’s haptic proximity sensor. If you want a professional CAD image of your room for design or architectural purposes, you’ll have to pony up to $15, $29, or $39 per scan based on the complexity you require. To start, position your iPhone or iPad in front of the object you want to capture and tap the Shutter button. To scan something, tap the Shutter button and move your iPhone or iPad around the object to grab different views until the shaded lines on the screen disappear. The free Polycam – LiDAR 3D Scanner app can scan and capture specific scenes and objects, then display them as 3D images.
With the free Playground AR: Physics Sandbox, you place virtual blocks in a real environment to see how they interact with each other. You can choose cubes, rectangles, triangles, cylinders, cue balls, and model cars, then tap a button to put each item on a floor, table, or other surface. By watching an ad, you can unlock even more model objects for your current session, including a plane, helicopter, cannon, and catapult.
3D Scanner App.
Now with iOS 12’s Quicklook feature you can now share 3D models over iMessage, Email and the web in pixar’s USDZ format
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