iOS Hardware

2 min read

iOS Hardware Families #

ARKit, the underlying real time tracking technology that Jetset uses to measure camera motion, has been in iOS devices since 2017, but the capabilities of iOS devices have changed enormously during the development of Jetset.

The hardware capabilities largely break down into 3 ‘families’ of devices that can run Jetset:

iPhone XR/XS, iPhone 11 Pro — these phones work, but their lack of LiDAR sensor and low GPU memory means they have model limit sizes and can’t do the 3D scanning that is really critical for Jetset Cine.
iPhone 12/13/14 Pro — these phones have LiDAR which makes them a good fit for Cine. They can load mid sized models (150MB-250MB)
iPhone 15 Pro and iPad Pro — these devices have powerful GPUs and good cooling.

The differences come down to heat, LiDAR sensor presence/absence, and the size of 3D model that the GPU can render.

Heat #

Using Jetset for longer periods of time will heat up the device. The iPhone XR/XS, 11, 12, 13, and 14 all handle heat incrementally better, but an external cooler is still needed to use the phone in any sort of production scenario.

The Razr Choma works well and connects using MagSafe to iPhone models starting with the 12. It has considerable fan noise.

Model Size #

The size of the USDZ model gives a rough idea of whether it will load correctly. Apple doesn’t provide a ‘memory limit’ to us, so we can’t make a ‘gas tank’ type bar to show how close a user model is to the limit.

During loading, we show the closest version of this that we can, which is simply the amount of memory that the app is taking up while loading the model.

A rough guide to device model size limits: