When using ARKit, why can’t you get the front-facing and back-facing camera feeds at once?

I’d like to use ARKit world tracking and display both the back camera feed and the front camera feeds, using the front feed as as a PIP. This would work great for an internet streaming use case.

However, it’s impossible. As soon as ARKit is told to use one mode, the camera for the other side freezes/doesn’t work. This page also says you have to pick one camera to show: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/arkit_in_ios/choosing_which_camera_feed_to_augment?language=objc

A question to the developers: why is this limitation in-place? Are there any work-arounds for the use case of ARKit world tracking + displaying the back camera feed + displaying the front camera feed as an overlay?

It’s possible to do this with plain camera initialization without ARKit. (There’s an official example.) With ARKit, it no longer works. It’s strange that I cannot access the front feed via one of the other frameworks, but I guess that ARKit blocks that.

Answered by DTS Engineer in 817821022

Hello @KTRosenberg,

There is no supported way to access both the front and rear facing camera streams during an ARSession, please file an enhancement request using Feedback Assistant.

Best regards,

Greg

Might an engineer comment? I wonder if this is a reasonable feature request or it this is a strong limitation.

Hello @KTRosenberg,

There is no supported way to access both the front and rear facing camera streams during an ARSession, please file an enhancement request using Feedback Assistant.

Best regards,

Greg

When using ARKit, why can’t you get the front-facing and back-facing camera feeds at once?
 
 
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