How it works
Two sensors. One phone. Nothing leaves it.
A launch monitor has to answer two different questions: what moved, and where. Your iPhone already ships with a sensor for each.
Camera — the motion
240 fps, then a model.
High-frame-rate capture catches the ball off the face and your body through the swing. The model turns that into 13 ball-flight metrics, your P1–P10 positions, and the kinematic sequence — in about two seconds.
LiDAR — the green
Depth, not guesswork.
On the putting surface, LiDAR maps the corridor between your ball and the cup — every rise and fall between the two — so the break and the line are measured rather than estimated.
LiDAR reads the green. It doesn’t track the ball in flight — that’s the camera, and the launch monitor works without a depth sensor at all.
On-device
Your swing never goes to a server.
Inference runs on the phone’s neural engine. That’s partly a privacy decision and partly a speed one — a round trip to a server costs more time than the whole computation does.
No radar unit. No sensors to buy. No calibration ritual before a session.
Getting a good read
Three things that matter.
Position
Face-on — not down the line. You need to be in frame at least up to your shoulders, with the ball in shot. That framing is what the analysis depends on.
Light
Enough of it. High frame rates need light, so a dim garage bay is the most common cause of a poor capture.
Space
A net or screen at a normal hitting distance, and enough room to make your full swing.
Tested in the open
Against professional-grade hardware.
In live side-by-side testing against a professional-grade launch monitor, LiPAR matched ball speed, carry and spin to within 2%.
Not a lab result — head to head, shot after shot, on camera. Accuracy claims are cheap, which is exactly why this one was run in public rather than asserted.
Where it stands
What’s solid, and what’s still tightening.
Ball speed, launch, carry, and shot shape are the strongest outputs — they come most directly from what the camera can see. Spin and club delivery are inferred, and the models improve with each release.
The Swing Coaching index shows a confidence band for the same reason. A tool that pretends to more precision than it has isn’t much use for practice.
Requires iPhone 13 Pro or newer.
The launch monitor and Swing Coaching need the high-frame-rate capture and Neural Engine in those models. The Greens additionally needs LiDAR — which every Pro iPhone from the 13 Pro onward has.