Speaking of which, the difference between the Pro series of the iPhone and the ordinary version on the camera, in addition to the telephoto lens that everyone knows, there is actually a less conspicuous difference - LiDAR lidar.
As early as March 2020, Apple took the lead in adding a LiDAR lidar to the iPad Pro, and the promotion at the time was to "prepare for future AR games." But after such a long time, AR games are still tepid. So is this LiDAR on the iPhone just a decoration?
In fact, through these apps, we can make it work and help our iPhone become a practical tool, let's take a look at it with me.
01 Rangefinder: Make your phone a walk-in ruler
I believe that users who know something about the iPhone basically know this function, open the rangefinder App that comes with the phone, and quickly get the distance between the two points after a simple dot operation. To test its actual effect, I chose my own computer to measure its length.
The result of 31cm has a slight error with the 31.5cm we actually measured, which may be a slight error in the position of the fixed point, or perhaps because the iPhone itself does not display the length value after the decimal point, which is still relatively accurate overall.
02 Character Detection: Caring for Visually Impaired Friends
The character detection function may not be useful to ordinary people, and ordinary mobile phones can achieve similar effects through algorithms. But the difference between the iPhone and the person being detected is that it can express the distance between the phone holder and the person being detected through voice.
This feature is not in the rangefinder, but in the amplifier app that comes with iOS. Among the 5 subdivision functions of the amplifier, the rightmost icon is the character detection function, and the character detection function can be opened by clicking. In addition to the on-screen display values, you can also turn on sound and touch prompts in the settings, and there are also voice prompts for the visually impaired.
According to my actual measurements, the iPhone can detect the maximum distance of the character up to 10m; the longest distance of the voice reminder can reach 6m, including when the character is not detected, it will also perform voice prompts. With it, visually impaired people can identify whether there is anyone in this part of the space in front of them according to mobile phone prompts, and can provide certain help when queuing, walking, taking transportation, and eating in restaurants.
033D Scan Modeling: Loading the real world into a phone
Thanks to LiDAR's rapid scanning of the surrounding environment, what was once difficult 3D modeling work can now be easily implemented with the iPhone. However, this feature itself requires the use of a third-party 3D modeling app, and here we use the 3D Scanner App.
According to the prompts in the App, you can start modeling the surrounding environment, the App will record the object in a variety of styles (choose by yourself) when scanning the object, to ensure that the fineness of the modeling can choose to repeat, multiple scans, to avoid omissions.
Depending on the type of modeling diagram generated, some of them are directly the appearance of the original object; some are like the modeling patterns in a 3D printer, only the basic outline, but they can also be colored and restored. The modeling effect depends on whether the scanning process is missing, and how easy it is to obtain the depth of field of the scanned object, the more complex it is, the more likely it is to miss detail, but the detail in some areas is still well preserved.
In fact, from the perspective of application scenarios, the effect that 3D scanning can do so far is enough. For example, in the scene of renovating houses, most of the new houses that have just arrived are in a rough state, basically only the basic lines, and there is no other object inside, which is easy to achieve complete 3D scanning.
04 Summary
From the actual experience, with the help of the above three apps, LiDAR can indeed play a role, providing a lot of practical functions, and at the same time, the effect is better than the 2D camera and the 3DToF camera. However, LiDAR can provide much more than that, with such powerful hardware as the foundation, I hope that developers can continue to work hard in the future to bring us more novel and practical interesting gameplay.
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