Lantern: Model anything

Lantern is an AI-powered mobile application that transforms a standard smartphone into a real-time 3D scanner using entirely on-device inference. Users simply point their phone at an object and walk around it for approximately 30 seconds while Lantern estimates depth, tracks camera motion, reconstructs geometry, and generates a dimensionally accurate 3D mesh, all without sending data to the cloud. Built with ExecuTorch, Lantern demonstrates how edge AI can deliver fast, private, and offline 3D reconstruction on consumer smartphones. By eliminating the need for expensive LiDAR hardware, external computers, or cloud processing, Lantern makes high-quality 3D scanning more accessible to engineers, designers, makers, researchers, and students. The generated 3D models can be used for reverse engineering, CAD workflows, rapid prototyping, digital asset creation, manufacturing, and AR/VR applications. Lantern showcases the power of on-device AI by combining computer vision, monocular depth estimation, and real-time 3D reconstruction into a seamless mobile experience. Our goal is to make professional-quality 3D scanning available to anyone with a smartphone while preserving user privacy and enabling low-latency performance through efficient edge inference.