What is LiDAR on iPhone (and what can you do with it)?

What is LiDAR?

LiDAR stands for Light Detection and Ranging. Apple's LiDAR Scanner is a tiny time-of-flight sensor next to the rear cameras: it fires out invisible infrared light and measures how long it takes to bounce back from surfaces around you, up to roughly five metres away. From those timings it builds a live depth map — it knows how far away every point in front of it is. In effect, your phone can "see" the shape and distance of the room, not just a flat picture of it.

Which iPhones and iPads have LiDAR?

LiDAR is a Pro-only feature. It arrived on the 2020 iPad Pro and the iPhone 12 Pro, and has been on every Pro iPhone since:

• iPhone: every Pro and Pro Max model from the iPhone 12 Pro onward.
• iPad: iPad Pro models from 2020 onward.

Standard (non-Pro) iPhones, and the iPad Air and iPad mini, do not have the LiDAR Scanner. A quick way to tell: if your phone has three rear cameras with a small extra black circle beside them, that circle is the LiDAR Scanner.

What can you do with iPhone LiDAR?

Faster focus, especially in the dark

The most everyday benefit: because LiDAR knows how far away your subject is, the camera locks focus almost instantly — even in low light where a normal camera hunts. On supported models it also enables Night mode portraits.

Better augmented reality

LiDAR gives AR apps an instant, accurate understanding of surfaces, so virtual objects sit convincingly on your floor or table and can be hidden behind real furniture (occlusion). Placement is faster and far more stable than camera-only AR.

3D scanning of rooms and objects

This is where LiDAR shines. Scanning apps use it to capture a room — or a single object — as a 3D model in minutes. Apple's RoomPlan technology builds on the same sensor to recognise walls, doors, windows and furniture automatically, which is why a good scan can become a tidy, structured model rather than a raw blob.

Floor plans and accurate measurements

Because LiDAR measures real distances, the scan carries real dimensions. That's what lets an app turn a walkthrough into an accurate, measured floor plan — wall lengths, room areas and ceiling heights included — without a tape measure. Apple's own Measure app uses LiDAR for quicker, steadier measurements too.

Accessibility

In the Magnifier app, LiDAR powers People Detection, which tells a blind or low-vision user how far away nearby people are — a practical, everyday use of the same depth sensing.

LiDAR vs the regular camera

A regular camera captures colour and detail but no true depth; some apps reconstruct 3D from many overlapping photos (photogrammetry), which works on any phone but is slower and less exact. LiDAR measures depth directly, so it's faster and dimensionally accurate — ideal when measurements matter, as they do for floor plans. (More on that trade-off in our guide to the best 3D room scanning apps.)

Turn your LiDAR into floor plans and 3D tours

If you have a Pro iPhone or an iPad Pro, that little sensor can do real work. FloorLens uses it to turn a quick scan into a floor plan and an editable 3D scene with automatic measurements, then lets you share the result as an interactive 3D tour anyone opens in a browser — no app, no login.