Which phones and cameras shoot 3D?

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Most people find out their phone shoots 3D by accident - a button in the camera app they had never pressed. Then the file lands on a computer and shows up flat, because nothing on the desktop knows what to do with it.

That is the part Oku3D handles. Everything on this page is a device that records two real views of the scene rather than guessing depth from one, and almost all of it opens in the player exactly as it was shot, with no conversion step and nothing to configure.

And if none of it describes what you own: any phone can shoot stereo with an app, by taking the two eye views one after the other.

What the last column means

Plays as shot

Open the file. Both eye views appear in 3D, with nothing to set.

Pick layout once

The file carries no hint of how its two views are packed, and its frame is one the player may not settle from the picture alone. If it opens flat, choose the layout in the bottom bar, press Ctrl+D, and every later file the player cannot identify follows suit.

Convert first

What the camera records is not stereo yet. Run the maker's own export step, and the result plays as shot.

Hardware list reviewed September 2026. A phone or camera released since then is missing rather than excluded - what decides whether it plays is the format it writes, and that changes far more slowly than the model names do.

A note on honesty: the iPhone, Galaxy and JVC rows below were opened here, on real files off the devices, and so was an MVC recording from a Sony 3D camcorder. Every other row states what the format that device writes does in the player - which the 210 supported file types cover - not a test on that specific model. If something on this list misbehaves, tell me and it gets fixed.

Phones

The two makers shipping stereo capture in a phone you can buy today - and they go about it differently. Apple builds it into the camera app and has carried it into every twin-camera model since the iPhone 15 Pro, so a newer iPhone almost certainly has it - the single-lens iPhone Air and 16e are the exception, because two views need two lenses. Samsung enables it model by model through the separate Camera Assistant app, so a newer Galaxy has to reach Samsung's own list first. Both write the same two formats.

Headsets and tablets

A headset sees the world through two cameras already, so several of them record what they see. Glasses-free tablets do the same with a stereo pair on the back.

Dedicated 3D cameras

Two lenses, one body, nothing to rig. Everything here exists because of the second lens.

Cinema and pro rigs

Where a stereo pair is assembled from a big sensor and a special lens. The camera records something a player cannot read yet - the maker's software turns it into stereo first.

Discontinued, still worth using

None of these are made any more, all of them turn up used, and the files they wrote still open. If a drawer at home holds one, its memory card is 3D you already own.

Any phone, with an app

Nothing above matching what is in your pocket? Two eye views do not have to be captured at the same instant. Photograph the subject, move the phone about 6 cm to the side, photograph it again - the two frames are a stereo pair, and an app does the aligning. Photographers have called this the cha-cha method since long before phones existed.

It costs you moving subjects: anything that shifts between the two shots comes out as a ghost. What it buys is everything else - a phone that has no 3D mode at all, a zoom no fixed twin-lens camera can match, and a stereo base you choose yourself. Step a meter sideways instead of six centimeters and a mountain range gets the depth a human eye never sees.

Everything in that last column opens in Oku3D as shot. Third-party apps, listed because they work - no affiliation, and nothing here is sponsored.

What the files actually are

A short list of formats covers everything above. Knowing which one you have is only useful when something goes wrong - otherwise the player works it out on its own.

Anything not on this list - an ordinary photo, a 2D movie, a game through screen capture - still plays in 3D. It just gets there the other way, with the depth AI estimating what the camera never measured.

If a file opens flat

A stereo file with no tag anywhere - no container metadata, no format in the file name, no telltale frame shape - looks to most players like an ordinary picture that happens to be wide. Some 3D cameras write exactly that. Oku3D compares the two halves of the picture, so most such files still open in 3D; the ones that slip through are a video whose opening picture is black or nearly featureless, or a frame shape the check cannot settle.

1. Pick the layout in the bottom bar - Full SBS for nearly every dedicated 3D camera. For a VR180 or fisheye rig, set Projection in the view menu as well.
2. Press Ctrl + D. A toast confirms what was saved.
3. Every later file the player cannot identify inherits that layout, so a whole memory card is one decision.

Files the player can identify keep their own format regardless, so saving a default never breaks the next spatial video. The Help page covers what overrides what.

The other direction happens too: if the depth looks inside-out - the background nearer than the subject - the eyes are swapped, and the format menu has a switch for it.

Scanning a place instead of shooting it

Everything above captures a view: two eyes, one direction, fixed the moment the shutter closed. A 3D scan captures the place itself. You walk around the subject filming or photographing it from every side, an app works out where each shot was taken from, and what comes back is a scene made of millions of colored specks - a Gaussian splat. Oku3D opens one and lets you move through it, so the viewpoint is yours rather than the photographer's.

Nothing about it needs special hardware. An ordinary phone camera is enough; a LiDAR sensor helps on blank walls and plain surfaces, where there is nothing for the software to recognize from one frame to the next.

Phone apps do the whole job, and so do desktop tools that train a scan from footage you shot yourself. Which one you use changes nothing here - what matters for playback is only the file you get out at the end.

Oku3D opens the formats the field settled on: PLY, SPLAT, SPZ and KSPLAT, PlayCanvas / SuperSplat's SOG as a single file or as the folder of pieces it writes, SPX, splats carried inside a GLB or a USD / USDZ scene, World Labs' RAD, and a LichtFeld Studio project. If your scanning app can write any of those, its scans open here. How to move through one is on the Help page.