Peekaboo

Inspiration

Every parent's camera roll is full of photos of their kid looking at them instead of the camera. On every phone until now, there's nothing next to the lens for a kid to look at.

What it does

Peekaboo turns iPhone Duo's outer screen, which sits right beside the camera and faces the kid, into a stage. A full-screen cartoon friend (Peekaboo Bear, Pikachu, a Minion, Mickey, Pip the puppy…) plays there with a jingle. If the kid looks away, the character runs to where they're looking and leads their eyes up to the lens. The moment their face points at the lens, the photo takes itself. Then the kid is rewarded: "That's you!" with their own photo, "Cartoon you!" (a Decart-made cartoon of them) and "Dress-up you!" (a Decart virtual try-on video). Parents pick the style, pose, costume and their own prompt in Cartoon Studio. Half-fold the phone on a table and it becomes a hands-free tabletop camera.

How we built it

SwiftUI on the iOS 27.1 SDK with the new iPhone Duo APIs: CameraCaptureAccessory / sceneAccessory for the outer display, ArrangementView across the fold, reservedRegions for the fold (tabletop mode) and the camera cutout, AVCaptureDeviceDirectionCoordinator to always shoot from the camera facing the kid, and vertical toolbar placements. Vision face yaw and pitch fire the shutter. Lottie runs the characters. Decart Lucy Image 2 and Lucy VTON make the cartoons and dress-up videos. Built and run in Bitrig.

Challenges

No iPhone Duo hardware or camera in the simulator, so we built a demo mode with a photo-real toddler who looks around the room. Decart rejects trademarked names, so costumes are described rather than named.

What's next

A live cartoon mirror (Decart realtime), pet mode, and a shared album for grandparents.

Code: https://github.com/techadnank9/peekaboo

Built With

• avfoundation
• bitrig
• decart
• ios
• iphone-duo
• lottie
• swift
• swiftui
• vision
• xcode