I’m purchasing 2-3 iPhones for a live performance project using the Live Link Face App developed by Epic (Live Link Face on the App Store) We’re using the Live Link ARKit setting and not the MetaHuman Animator setting. We are using MetaHumans though.
Is there a model of iPhone that is best for this? It seems like stores still have iPhone 14s in stock but there is also the cost effective iPhone 16e coming out. I know I need the front facing camera with TrueDepth but is there are there any performance gains or fidelity gains across versions of the iPhone that would impact my purchase? I have previously used an iPhone X for a project like this and it worked just fine. Additionally, I might later on use these phones for a project using the MetaHuman Animator setting so as a long term purchase I’m curious if there are any gains for various iPhone versions that would impact that setting as well.
For the MetaHuman Animator mode please see the ‘Capture Devices’ section on the MetaHuman Plugin Hardware and Device Requirements page. The recommended device is the iPhone 12 due to the depth data being of higher quality on older device models. That said newer phones will still produce good results.
For ARKit I would say that you will not likely see any fidelity differences between device models as the system is not solely dependent on depth data, however it’s likely that performance will be improved on newer devices. A historical issue for ARKit mode is that 60 FPS processing could not be maintained and performance would drop to 30 FPS due to thermal load. As devices grow more powerful with better thermal management I would expect ARKit to be able to run for longer without throttling on newer devices such as an iPhone 16, though I can’t make any guarantees.