Apple wants to turn your iPhone into a pet-tracking camera

Apple has a new development framework that can be used to turn your iPhone into an autonomous pet-tracking camera. According to the documentation on Apple’s websiteDevelopers can use pet-tracking features with a motorized phone stand to capture and follow your pet when you’re not home.

As noted by Apple, developers can achieve this by using a new framework called Dockerkit, which can create a “photo and video experience” while an iPhone is placed on a motorized stand. From there, devs can then use something called the Animal Body Pose API (application programming interface), which is able to identify and track animals with your phone’s camera. It is also able to identify a pet’s posture, including whether your pet is sitting down, standing or begging for food.

By combining DockKit with the Animal Body Pose API, Apple says devs can create apps that “automatically track subjects in live video over a 360-degree field of view, with direct control of the stand to optimize framing.” control the motors directly, and provide its own inference model for tracking other objects. To be clear, pet-tracking is not an official iOS 17 feature being shipped by Apple , but the company is giving developers the tools they need to build and launch their own iPhone-powered pet cams. Apple plans to get into all of this in more detail in a Upcoming sessions at its Worldwide Developers Conference,