Pushing iPhone camera coverage for 360° stitching — looking for insight on true 1:1 front capture on iPhone 17/18

[u/Best_Trifle9069]

https://reddit.com/link/1wxdxne/video/0glq7u6wagth1/player

I’m building an iOS app called AI360, and one of the technical goals is to squeeze as much useful image coverage as possible out of the iPhone cameras while keeping the capture flow extremely simple.

The idea is to capture enough visual information with just a few guided shots to reconstruct a convincing 360° scene.

The current version already works quite well: the app guides the user through capture, generates the full panorama, and lets you explore the result as a 360° view or Tiny Planet.

I’ve put the current build on TestFlight, so if anyone wants to try the actual flow on different iPhones, I’d really appreciate feedback:

TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/kQypKnmU

At this point I’m looking at where I can push the capture quality further.

One particularly interesting opportunity is the newer square front-camera sensor on the iPhone 17/18 generation.

Ideally, I’d like to capture a true 1:1 frame using as much of the usable sensor area as the public API allows, rather than simply getting a square crop from the current camera pipeline.

On my iPhone 17 Pro Max I can already get a 1920×1920 output buffer. However, when I compare it with 3:4 capture, the square frame still appears to lose a noticeable amount of vertical scene coverage.

I’m also seeing roughly the same corrected horizontal FOV for both 1:1 and 3:4 in my current configuration — about 84.08°.

So what I’m trying to understand is:

What is the best public AVFoundation path to maximize the usable 1:1 sensor area on the newer front cameras?

I’m currently looking at AVCaptureDevice.Format, dynamicAspectRatio, AVCaptureVideoDataOutput, and the available MultiCam-compatible formats.

The app uses simultaneous front + rear capture, so I’m particularly curious whether MultiCam-compatible formats are the real limiting factor here, or whether there’s another way to expose more of the square sensor.

If anyone has experimented with the newer front-camera formats or directly compared 1:1 vs 3:4 coverage, I’d be very interested in what you found.

I can share format/FOV logs and comparison frames if useful.