Bringing Advanced Depth to Everyone: ViroReact’s Latest Update v2.51.0
How we are bringing depth precision to older iPhones, plus major stability fixes for Android and iOS.
We’re kicking February off with a bang, having just shipped a massive update to the ViroReact, and I am excited to finally share what we’ve been working on. This isn’t just a maintenance update (though we did squash some gnarly bugs), it’s a significant leap forward in making high-quality AR accessible to more users.
Here is a breakdown of what is new, fixed, and improved.
The Headliner: Depth Without LiDAR
Historically, on iOS, the “magic” of high-end AR, perfect occlusion, precise object placement, and accurate hit testing, has been gated behind hardware. If your user didn’t have an iPhone Pro with a LiDAR scanner, their experience was often a “lite” version of what you intended.
That changes today.
In ViroReact 2.51.0, we have implemented Monocular Depth Estimation using the Depth Anything v2 CoreML model.
So, what does this mean for you?
- Legacy Support: Older devices like the iPhone XR and iPhone 11, and newer devices like the iPhone 17, now have access to rich, real-time depth maps.
- Unified Experience: You can now build AR experiences that rely on depth data without worrying about fragmenting your user base.
- Smarter Hit Testing: We’ve updated our hit-testing logic to use this new ML data, meaning virtual objects stay exactly where you put them, regardless of the device.
A Note for Developers: Because the CoreML model is a separate asset, you will need to download it and bundle it with your app to enable these features on non-LiDAR devices. We have added a link to the model and setup instructions in our docs.
Squashing the Stability Bugs
While new features are exciting, stability is what lets you sleep at night. Here are the stability fixes we’ve addressed in this update.
- Android & Expo Router: We tracked down and fixed the elusive “black screen” bug that occurred when switching screens. Navigation is now smooth and reliable.
- iOS Memory Health: This has been an ongoing issue and in 2.51.0 we have made signficant progress. We plugged a major memory leak related to
ARFrameretention. Your apps can now run longer sessions without creeping memory usage. - No More Deadlocks: We resolved threading issues that were causing AR sessions to lock up under specific race conditions.
What’s Next?
I shared some of our bigger product plans in my 2025 reflection post, and we’re continuing to work away at those updates and update like 2.51.0 are an important step along the way to these bigger product updates. In the meantime, though, we will continue to ship regular bug fixes and performance updates to keep ViroReact and the wider ReactVision product suite stable and reliable.