My iPhone Is Unexpectedly Making My Photos 3D
I recently installed iOS 26 on my iPhone. I’m slow, I know, but as I was swiping past my Photos widget, I noticed that one of my photos was in 3D. The image wiggled around as I moved my phone in my hand. “What the hell,” I thought.
This was just a normal photo I took on my iPhone 16, so I was initially confused as to why it had transformed into a stereoscopic image. Naturally, I investigated further and it turns out it is Spatial mode, which launched with iOS 26. It works with most images on your device and gives two-dimensional photos a feeling of depth as you look at it from slightly different angles.
There is a bit of AI in there because you can move the subject around to reveal a background that was never actually photographed. The AI has generated what it thinks should be there based on its computer vision of the image.
While baffling, I did start scrolling through my photos to pick some other images that I thought would gel with the 3D treatment. It works in mere seconds; the Spatial mode button appears on the top right of the image and once clicked, it works almost instantaneously.
I’m still confused as to why it just decided to pick a random photo to make 3D and then serve it up to me on my widget, but hey, I guess Apple has got to push out its features.
It’s kind of funny because stereograms have been entertaining people since the 19th century. Back then, photographers would take two near-identical 2D images that were inserted into a special viewing device that was placed on each eye, the human brain does the rest.
So how does Apple’s Spatial mode work? It’s certainly distinguished from stereoscopy; Apple made a model called Depth Pro that can essentially create a 2.25 megapixel depth map in just 0.3 seconds without needing any information from the camera. It doesn’t work on all photos: the 0.5 megapixels photo I saved from Facebook did not have the Spatial button available, presumably from the lack of data.
While it’s a pretty cool feature on your phone — if you’re into the 3D effect — the tech is actually designed for the Vision Pro headset. PetaPixel’s editor-in-chief Jaron Schneider viewed spatial photos inside Apple’s headset.
“Seeing a photo I took turned spatial triggered something in me that seeing the photo in the original flat space did not,” Schnieder wrote. “It felt like being back there, at the moment the photo was taken. It tickled my brain in a way that is difficult to explain.”
While I’ve never donned one of Apple’s headsets, I have taken a photo on a 360-degree camera and later loaded it into an Oculus Quest. It is awesome to feel like you’re inside a photo, especially if you’ve got the camera in the middle of a group of people, so you can look around and see all the different faces looking back at you.
Photography is mostly a 2D affair, but viewing images in 3D is a trend that keeps coming back even across the centuries. Finding new and interesting ways to view an image should be applauded, and I have no issue with Apple serving up my photos in 3D — in fact I have kept playing with it since I discovered it.
Image credits: Header photo via Apple
