iPhone

iPhone
Basic Info
VR/AR	Augmented Reality
Type	Smartphone
Subtype	Handheld Mobile AR platform
Platform	iOS
Creator	Apple Inc.
Developer	Apple Inc.
Manufacturer	Apple Inc. (contract manufactured by Foxconn and others)
Announcement Date	January 9, 2007
Release Date	June 29, 2007 (first generation)
Price	Original model from $499 (US); iPhone 17 from $799, iPhone 17 Pro from $1,099 (US)
Website	https://www.apple.com/iphone/
System
Operating System	iOS
Storage
Display
Display	OLED on current models (LCD on earlier models)
Image
Optics
Optics	N/A
Ocularity	N/A
Passthrough	N/A
Tracking
Tracking	Visual-inertial tracking via rear camera and IMU; LiDAR Scanner on Pro models
Eye Tracking	N/A
Hand Tracking	N/A
Audio
Camera	Rear wide, ultra-wide and telephoto cameras; front TrueDepth camera; LiDAR Scanner (Pro models)
Connectivity
Connectivity	Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular (LTE/5G on later models)
Ports	USB-C on iPhone 15 and later; Lightning on earlier models
Device
Sensors	Accelerometer, three-axis gyroscope, magnetometer, ambient light sensor; TrueDepth dot projector and infrared camera; LiDAR Scanner (Pro models)

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The iPhone is a line of smartphones designed and marketed by Apple Inc. that runs the iOS operating system. Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone on January 9, 2007 at the Macworld conference, describing it as a combination of an iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator, and the device went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007 for $499 (4 GB) and $599 (8 GB). Apple shipped about 232 million iPhones worldwide in 2024, the most of any smartphone brand that year.

Within the field of Augmented Reality, the iPhone is the most widely deployed consumer AR device. Since 2017 it has run ARKit, Apple's software framework for placing virtual objects in a live camera view, and Pro models since 2020 carry a rear LiDAR Scanner that captures per-pixel depth for faster and more accurate AR. The iPhone also acts as a capture and companion device for Apple's headset, the Apple Vision Pro: the iPhone 15 Pro and later can record stereoscopic spatial video for playback in the headset. Unlike a head-mounted display, the iPhone presents AR on a flat handheld screen rather than through optics worn over the eyes, a category usually called Mobile AR.

History

Apple announced the original iPhone on January 9, 2007 and released it on June 29, 2007. The first model had a 3.5-inch multi-touch display at 480x320 resolution, a 2-megapixel rear camera, a single physical home button, and AT&T as the exclusive US carrier. It sold its first million units in 74 days.

The product line grew into Apple's largest business and, by unit volume, the best-selling smartphone family. Counterpoint Research and other analysts have repeatedly ranked individual iPhone models among the world's top-selling phones; Apple shipped roughly 232.1 million iPhones in 2024 against Samsung's 223.4 million, making it the year's leading smartphone brand by shipments.

Two hardware milestones are central to the iPhone's role in AR. In November 2017 the iPhone X added the front-facing TrueDepth camera, a structured-light depth sensor, and in October 2020 the iPhone 12 Pro added a rear LiDAR Scanner. Both are described in the sections below. The most recent generation, the iPhone 17 family (iPhone 17, iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max), was announced on September 9, 2025 and released on September 19, 2025; the Pro models use the A19 Pro chip.

Selected iPhone models relevant to AR and depth sensing

Model	Announced	Notable AR/depth hardware
iPhone (1st generation)	January 9, 2007	Single rear camera; no depth sensing
iPhone X	September 12, 2017	First TrueDepth front camera (Face ID); first OLED iPhone
iPhone 12 Pro / 12 Pro Max	October 13, 2020	First rear LiDAR Scanner
iPhone 15 Pro / 15 Pro Max	September 12, 2023	Spatial video capture for Apple Vision Pro; USB-C
iPhone 17 Pro / 17 Pro Max	September 9, 2025	A19 Pro chip; LiDAR Scanner

Hardware

An iPhone combines an Apple-designed system on a chip, a multi-touch OLED or LCD display, multiple cameras, and a set of motion sensors. The motion sensors relevant to spatial computing are a three-axis accelerometer, a three-axis gyroscope, and a magnetometer; fused together as an inertial measurement unit (IMU), they supply the high-rate orientation and acceleration data that ARKit combines with camera images to track the device in space.

Current iPhones use OLED displays; the iPhone X in 2017 was the first iPhone with an OLED panel. Since the iPhone 15 in 2023, the line has used a USB-C connector in place of the earlier Lightning connector, following a European Union requirement for a common charging port.

TrueDepth camera

The TrueDepth camera system debuted on the iPhone X in November 2017. It is a front-facing structured-light depth sensor with three main parts: an infrared flood illuminator, a dot projector that casts roughly 30,000 infrared dots in a fixed pattern, and an infrared camera that reads the deformation of that pattern to build a depth map of whatever faces the camera. Apple's first applications were Face ID, a biometric authentication system Apple states has a roughly one-in-a-million false-match rate, and Animoji, animated characters driven by the user's facial expressions. The same structured-light approach was used earlier in Microsoft's Kinect, which was based on technology from PrimeSense.

LiDAR Scanner

The iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max, announced on October 13, 2020, were the first iPhones with a rear LiDAR Scanner. LiDAR (light detection and ranging) is a time-of-flight depth sensor: it emits laser light and measures how long the light takes to return, producing a distance value for each sampled point, in effect a depth value per pixel rather than the color and brightness a normal camera records. Apple positioned it for "instant AR," because the scanner captures depth in the equivalent of a single snapshot, so an app can place a virtual object immediately without the user first moving the phone to let the software estimate scene geometry from parallax. Reporting at launch placed the scanner's effective range at up to about five meters and noted that the depth data improves occlusion, the effect of virtual objects being correctly hidden behind real ones. The LiDAR Scanner has remained a Pro-line feature on subsequent models.

Software for AR

ARKit

ARKit is Apple's augmented reality framework, introduced on June 5, 2017 at the Worldwide Developers Conference and shipped to users with iOS 11 on September 19, 2017. It uses the rear camera together with the IMU to perform visual-inertial tracking, detect flat surfaces such as floors and tables, and estimate scene lighting, so that developers can anchor virtual content to the real world. Apple's purchase of the German AR company Metaio in 2015 brought engineers and patents that fed into the framework. Apple has updated ARKit roughly once a year:

Major ARKit releases

Version	Year	Selected additions
ARKit 1	2017	Plane detection, visual-inertial tracking, light estimation
ARKit 2	2018	Shared and persistent experiences; introduced the USDZ format and AR Quick Look
ARKit 3	2019	People Occlusion; real-time body Motion Capture; simultaneous front and rear camera use
ARKit 4	2020	Depth API using the LiDAR Scanner; Location Anchors keyed to latitude, longitude and elevation

People Occlusion, added in ARKit 3 in 2019, lets the system place virtual objects in front of or behind people in the scene so that the composite looks layered correctly, and Motion Capture estimates a person's skeletal pose in real time. ARKit 4 in 2020 added a Depth API that reads the LiDAR Scanner directly, and Location Anchors that fix AR content to a geographic coordinate using map data.

AR Quick Look and USDZ

AR Quick Look is a built-in viewer, introduced with iOS 12 in 2018, that displays 3D models in augmented reality without a separate app. It works inside Apple's stock apps including Safari, Messages, Mail, News, Notes and Files, so a 3D model embedded on a web page can be placed in the user's room straight from the browser. The models use USDZ, a single-file packaging of Pixar's open Universal Scene Description (USD) format that bundles geometry, textures and animation; Apple introduced USDZ in 2018. AR Quick Look also runs on visionOS for the Apple Vision Pro.

RealityKit is Apple's higher-level rendering and simulation framework for AR content, used together with ARKit, and the RoomCaptureView component of RoomPlan uses RealityKit to draw scan progress in real time.

RoomPlan

RoomPlan is a Swift API announced at WWDC in June 2022 that uses the camera and LiDAR Scanner on supported iPhone and iPad models to produce a parametric 3D floor plan of a room. Powered by ARKit and machine learning, it detects walls, windows, doors and openings as well as furniture categories such as tables, beds, sofas and cabinets, and exports the result as a USD or USDZ file with the dimensions of each element. Apple lists real estate, e-commerce, interior design and architecture as target uses. RoomPlan requires a LiDAR-equipped device.

Role in VR and AR

The iPhone occupies a different position in VR/AR than head-mounted displays. It does not place screens in front of the eyes; instead it shows AR on its handheld screen, the approach known as Mobile AR. Because of its scale, hundreds of millions of units a year, the iPhone is the single largest installed base for consumer AR, and ARKit made smartphone AR available to a large developer base when it shipped in 2017.

Concrete uses of iPhone AR include retail previews, where AR Quick Look lets shoppers place furniture or other products in their own space from a web page or app, and games and camera effects. Pokémon GO, released in 2016 before ARKit, popularized location-based smartphone AR and later adopted ARKit for more stable object placement, and Snapchat was among the first apps to use the iPhone 12 Pro's LiDAR Scanner for AR camera effects. The TrueDepth camera and LiDAR Scanner also feed 3D capture workflows such as Photogrammetry and room scanning via RoomPlan, producing models in the USDZ format that the same devices can display.

The iPhone's clearest tie to virtual and mixed reality hardware is its relationship with the Apple Vision Pro, the headset Apple began selling in 2024. With iOS 17.2, announced on December 11, 2023, the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max can record spatial video: the wide and ultra-wide rear cameras, which sit on a shared horizontal baseline in landscape orientation, capture a stereoscopic pair at 1080p and 30 frames per second in the MV-HEVC format, consuming about 130 MB per minute. These clips sync through iCloud and play back on Vision Pro either in a window or expanded into an immersive, life-size view. This made the iPhone a mainstream capture device for stereoscopic content aimed at a VR/MR headset, a function previously limited to dedicated stereo cameras.

Current status

The iPhone remains in production and is Apple's largest product line. As of mid-2026 the current generation is the iPhone 17 family, announced September 9, 2025, with the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max built on the A19 Pro chip and retaining the rear LiDAR Scanner used for AR and depth tasks. ARKit, RealityKit, AR Quick Look and RoomPlan continue to ship as part of iOS, and spatial video capture, first added on the iPhone 15 Pro, carries forward as a link between the iPhone and the Apple Vision Pro.

See also

• ARKit
• Apple Vision Pro
• Mobile AR
• RealityKit
• USDZ
• Apple Inc.
• Photogrammetry
• Pokémon GO