Event
LA Hacks
Team
Junfeng Lin, William Wang, Ajay Shah, Benjamin Jiang
SPECTRA is an on-device depth mapping app built at LA Hacks 2026 that turns the iPhone Pro's $25 LiDAR sensor into industrial-grade dense depth maps, in real time, with no cloud. SPECTRA won both the ZETIC Company Challenge and the Flicker to Flow track by closing the software gap between consumer hardware and industrial depth perception.
What it solves
Industrial depth sensors like Velodyne and Ouster cost $8,000 to $75,000. The iPhone Pro's LiDAR costs $25 in components and uses the same physics. The hardware gap closed years ago. The software gap never did. Standard upsampling gets to camera resolution but bleeds across object boundaries, missing exactly the thin obstacles like chair legs, wires and edges that matter most for robotics, AR and accessibility. SPECTRA writes the missing software layer.
What it does
SPECTRA takes the iPhone Pro's sparse 192x256 LiDAR signal and upsamples it into a dense 768x1024 metric depth map that follows real surface boundaries. The app runs in three modes: Live Depth showing raw LiDAR colormap overlay, SPECTRANet showing the enhanced on-device depth, and Demo showing an A/B side-by-side comparison between raw LiDAR and SPECTRA output. A single frame flip makes the improvement obvious in under a second.
How it works
SPECTRA uses SPECTRANet, an RGB-guided depth upsampler built on a MobileNetV2 encoder, converted to a 2MB fp16 CoreML package and deployed on-device through ZETIC Melange running on the Apple Neural Engine. The SwiftUI and ARKit app processes each frame at 15Hz with zero cloud dependency.