iPhone Photo Will Be Imbued With Holographic Effect

The newest iPhone operating system, iOS 26, might be the biggest update yet in a whole variety of ways, including a complete design and visual overhaul to make the entire interface feel as if users are touching what Apple calls "Liquid Glass." However, among the many nifty features users will discover is an eye-catching feature that almost feels like a parlor trick: the ability to give any photo a 3D effect.

In iOS 26, users can take almost any 2D photo they have captured with their phone and give it a 3D parallax effect, where it looks as if they can peek around the foreground of their image when they move their phone around. Apple calls it "Spatial Scenes." It looks like a hologram, and it’s pretty cool.

This fall, users will likely find lots of family and friends experimenting with Spatial Scenes, especially since they can do it with almost any photo, on any recent iPhone (12 or later), and apply these 3D effects to their lock screen. But if they dig a bit beneath the surface of this update, they wll see how this is a perfect example of how Apple envisions the iPhone as the gateway to a future where nearly every digital interaction is spatial and AR-friendly. AR, or augmented reality, is the underlying magic behind the company’s equally impressive and expensive Vision Pro headset, which lets users see and interact with digital elements in the real world.

The groundwork for augmented reality, including this new feature in iOS 26, was laid years ago when Apple introduced Portrait Mode in the iPhone 7 Plus. By blending information from two lenses, the camera system began capturing rudimentary depth maps, blurring backgrounds to mimic the look of a professional DSLR camera. Since then, the iPhone’s cameras have greatly advanced: adding lidar sensors in Pro models, refining the Neural Engine that processes the images you capture, and quietly collecting the data needed to make 3D reconstructions possible at scale.

Now, with Vision Pro on shelves and AR an official focus for Apple’s future pipeline, thanks to years of CEO Tim Cook evangelizing the bleeding-edge tech, Apple is putting these spatial capabilities front and center in the iPhone. Rather than limiting depth effects to photos taken in Portrait Mode, the new iOS 26 update can apply them retroactively to nearly any image in your library, so long as there’s a clear background and foreground to work with. Apple tells Fortune all they have to do is find a image in their library, click a new spatial icon in the top right corner, and their photo will come to life.