iPhone Duo Photos & Camera Q&A

Hi! We run continuous 2D human body-pose estimation on a front-facing camera feed: one person, full body in frame, standing a meter or two away, 30-60fps. With iPhone Duo open, the camera that faces the person looking at the inner display is the under-display inner camera (builtInInnerUltraWideCamera). Published specs cap it at 1080p at 30 or 60 fps, and it is presented as the FaceTime camera. Two things are unclear from the camera tech talk and the specs: Is that 1080p format a native readout we can feed to Vision body pose, or a preview-oriented stream whose effective detail is too low for full-body pose at that distance? Is third-party use of this camera supported for a long-running analysis session, or is it intended only for video calls and live previews? Thanks

For a user-selected photo wallpaper on iPhone Duo, does iOS use one source image and automatically adapt or crop it for the outer and inner displays, or can users assign separate images to the outer and inner displays? If one image is used, is the crop or focal position shared between both displays, or can the user adjust them independently?

Hello. Any recommendations on approach to placing a camera shutter button in half-open state? Also, other controls, like capture modes, etc. Camera preview is fullscreen.

When a persistent camera session such as FaceTime is active on the inner display, the under-display camera becomes visible. What is the behavior when such a session is active and the user switches to my app, where some content, such as Navigation titles, normally sits in the region of the camera? Will the camera become hidden again and show in FaceTime that the call participant's camera is unavailable, or is there some other behavior of which I as an app developer should be aware? Thank you!

Hello everyone! Does the ARKit ARSession qualify for an active camera session? Reading through the documentation, I understand that showing content on both iPhone Duo screens at the same time is only possible by using CameraCaptureAccessory. ARSession drives the camera but doesn't vend an AVCaptureSession that the app owns, so it isn't clear whether the availability check keys off app-owned AVCaptureSession state specifically, or off the camera actively streaming for the app. If it is currently not possible, do you see any way or workaround to show the camera stream on the outside display while the inner display is displaying an AR view? Best regards, André N.

Any tips on designing for half-open pose? Also how to detect that pose.

Any tips on positioning a shutter button on camera screen (fullscreen preview) when device is in half-open state? As well as other centred controls (camera mode, etc)? How to handle hinge area updates? Thanks

We present custom content on the outer display through CameraCaptureAccessory while a capture session runs (iOS 27.1). Our app is used in the partially folded "laptop" pose: the inner display is portrait with a horizontal fold, controls below the fold, content above it. The person in front of the outer camera sits opposite the device, so for them the outer display's long edge is horizontal. In Simulator (iPhone Duo, iOS 27.1) the accessory scene is always laid out as 466×678 pt — portrait — regardless of the pose, and regardless of the app's UISupportedInterfaceOrientations. Our landscape content is therefore letterboxed into a narrow band instead of filling the display. On device, what interface orientation does the accessory scene get in the partially folded pose? Does the system rotate it to match the physical orientation of the outer display, or is it always the outer display's portrait orientation? Is Simulator's behaviour here representative, or is accessory-scene orientation one of the things that only behaves correctly on device? If we have to compensate ourselves, is there a supported way to learn the outer display's physical orientation from inside the accessory scene — reserved regions, the scene's interfaceOrientation, something else? We would rather not hardcode a rotation. Does UIRequiresFullScreen (deprecated in iOS 26) or the app's supported interface orientations constrain the accessory scene in any way?

Hi, Can you talk about what happens with ARKit by default when the unfolding occurs in a normal ARWorldTrackingConfiguration - does the ARSession pause at all or is tracking completely uninterrupted? Does it swap cameras when using ARFaceTrackingConfiguration! Thanks.

Hi! We run continuous 2D human body-pose estimation on a front-facing camera feed: one person, full body in frame, standing a few meters away, about 30 fps. With iPhone Duo open, the camera that faces the person looking at the inner display is the under-display inner camera (builtInInnerUltraWideCamera). Published specs cap it at 1080p at 30 or 60 fps, and it is presented as the FaceTime camera. Two things are unclear from the camera tech talk and the specs: Is that 1080p format a native readout we can feed to Vision body pose, or a preview-oriented stream whose effective detail is too low for full-body pose at that distance? Is third-party use of this camera supported for a long-running analysis session, or is it intended only for video calls and live previews? Thanks

Hello team, When configuring an AVCaptureMultiCamSession or consuming the new Virtual Front Camera, what is the recommended architecture to avoid frame drops or pipeline rebuilds (AVCaptureSessionRuntimeError) during dynamic posture transitions (from folded to unfolded / half-open)? Specifically: Does the Virtual Front Camera handle the lens handover internally with continuous timestamps in CMSampleBuffer, or does the underlying device switch trigger a device disconnect/reconnect notification that requires re-attaching inputs? How are the optical intrinsics (matrix_float3x3) and lens distortion coefficients updated through the hinge motion? Can we rely on continuous metadata attachments on each frame during the transition, particularly if running real-time CoreML / Vision processing? Thanks!

Can all the cameras on iPhone Duo be active while an app tries to translate sign language using the front facing camera and back camera to monitor hand movements and show the translation with action in the expanded display with its camera on?

When iPhone Duo is fully open, so the outer front camera and the rear cameras face the same direction, is there a virtual AVCaptureDevice whose constituentDevices include both the outer front camera and the rear 48 MP wide camera, so that virtual device constituent photo delivery that could produce one photo from each of those cameras simultaneously, as is possible on existing iPhones with two rear cameras, using isVirtualDeviceConstituentPhotoDeliveryEnabled / virtualDeviceConstituentPhotoDeliveryEnabledDevices?

In our app we assume that user positioned the smartphone the way when the front camera (120fps) is on the left and the screen position is landscape (for watching video). We use it in our ML model. Can we adopt it somehow on iPhone Duo?

Does iPhone Duo support Dual Capture for video recording in all fold states?

Camera apps commonly use portrait-only orientation specifically to prevent the interface from rotating. Otherwise, toolbars, the preview aspect ratio, and camera frames all need to be reorganized just to undo the rotation. On the iPhone Duo inner display, portrait-only no longer prevents rotation. Please provide a UIRequiresFixedInterfaceOrientation key! :-)