Polycam Update Brings AI-Powered 3D Scanning to Your Regular iPhone

It’s a shift that opens the barn door wide to virtually any iPhone or iPad model from the last five years, moving the app away from a dependency on lidar-equipped “Pro” iPhones. All you need is an iPhone 13 or newer.

While Polycam has always had the ability to capture without lidar through photogrammetry (including a pseudo-video mode that pulls frames at intervals from your camera as you walked about) it effectively required dozens if not hundreds of individual shutter releases and significant cloud processing time. The update introduces an AI model designed to infer spatial depth from standard video content in minutes, mimicking the “walkthrough” flow of lidar scanning. All you need to do is walk through a room or around an object while the app provides real-time haptic and visual feedback. In short, you are effectively recording a video that the local hardware or cloud then converts into a 3D mesh.

What’s the Difference?

Using computer vision to calculate distances, Polycam positions the new mode as a faster alternative to photogrammetry-heavy processes in other popular scanning apps. The takeaway appears to be the swiftness of the system, rendering results locally, quickly. It also differs from another form of 3D rendering Polycam offers in gaussian splatting, which also works from video files but captures the look and lighting of a scene, rather than data that can be meshed.

The update does come with some physical boundaries, though. On-device processing is available for immediate, lower-resolution results, but the highest detail still requires a hand-off to Polycam’s servers. Floorplan generation – common to the lidar capture mode – as well as Android support will follow later this year.

Polycam’s strengths lie in capture interior and exterior spaces, no doubt, which puts a damper on its usefulness through the lens of 3D printing. However, the app itself is a toolkit for 3D creation, so simply for the sake of playing around, this update is worth a look, especially if you’re one of the millions walking around with a regular iPhone in your pocket. The app is available via the Apple App Store.

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