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LiDAR Is the iPhone 12 Pro’s Secret Weapon
Without the right app and task, Apple iPhone 12 Pro’s LiDAR scanner is little more than an oddity
New technology is nothing but an abstraction until you use it. For most people, the iPhone 12 Pro features just such an abstraction: LiDAR or Light Detection and Ranging. Apple started adding these sophisticated sensors to its iPad Pro line last spring and then to its iPhone 12 Pro line in October.
My experience with LiDAR goes back to 2004, the first time I saw self-driving car technology at Carnegie Mellon University. Researchers there were proudly displaying the first car to autonomously traverse a remote, 142-mile desert course and “win” the DARPA Grand Challenge (no one completed the race, but CMU’s Red Team went the furthest). It was at CMU that roboticists explained to me how the car used, among other sensors, LiDAR, which bounces the laser light off surfaces and then measures the time the light takes to return to the scanner, to create an accurate 3D rendering of the space and, for the CMU vehicle, a virtual map for it to navigate.
Since then, I’ve seen LiDAR on a variety of different vehicles including, once, an Apple Map car that, I’m guessing, was using it to create precise visual maps of city streets.
I’ve noticed, however, that despite its existence on the iPhone 12 Pro, Apple doesn’t mention this expensive piece of hardware in iPhone 12 Pro commercials. Tech media reviewers know that the LiDAR scanner assists the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max in focusing in low light situations. Basically, it can see in the dark, making portrait mode photography possible at night and in low light.
During the iPhone 12 unveiling last fall, Apple said the scanner would take augmented reality (AR) to the next level by building room scans and allowing for precise placement of AR objects.
When consumers think of AR, though, it’s mostly cute Snapchat filters that wrap to the contours of their face and, perhaps, some games that allow them to put realistic dinosaurs or Lego virtually in their home.
Fun, but not necessarily useful. LiDAR, however, has the potential to be so much more than a toy.
If you ever want to tax the…
