TikTok’s Latest Update Takes Advantage Of The iPhone 12’s LiDAR

One of the new hardware features that Apple introduced with the iPhone 12 is a LiDAR scanner. This is meant to help with augmented reality as well as helping the iPhone’s camera better autofocus especially in dimly-lit environments. It’s not necessarily a feature that we can “feel”, but TikTok is hoping to change that.

The company has announced an update to its app where it will be taking advantage of the LiDAR scanner on the iPhone 12. According to TikTok, this will allow users to create augmented reality effects that they can then interact with, as you can see in the example video shown below.

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To ring in 2021 we released our first AR effect on the new iPhone 12 Pro, using LiDAR technology which allows us to create effects that interact with your environment – visually bridging the digital and physical worlds. We're excited to develop more innovative effects in 2021! pic.twitter.com/6yFD2FfHta

— TikTokComms (@TikTokComms) January 6, 2021

Granted it might not necessarily be the most realistic application we’ve seen, but it seems like a pretty fun feature to use and we’re sure that TikTok users will find a way to make cool and fun videos with it. That being said, we should note that despite TikTok announcing the feature, it seems that it isn’t available worldwide just yet.

As TechCrunch notes, it seems that the feature won’t be available worldwide and that there are a handful of countries that will not be getting the feature (we’re not sure why), so that’s something you’ll want to take note of if you don’t see the new filters available for you.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Cellphones
Tags: Apps, Augmented Reality (AR), iphone 12, tiktok