Luma

A tiny, tactile instant camera for iPhone, built entirely in SwiftUI.

Luma is designed around one idea: the interaction is the product. It recreates the feel of a physical instant camera through motion, sound, haptics and deliberate little details that make taking a photo feel like an event rather than another button tap.

The experience

Drag to open. Luma lives as a compact pill beneath the Dynamic Island. Pull it open with a rubbery, detented drag, complete with physical clicks and haptic ticks at each stop.

Tap to snap. Press the chunky red shutter and the whole camera reacts. You get a proper flash bloom followed by a two-stage shutter haptic that mimics the mirror slap and curtain.

Morph, slot and eject. After capture, the camera body flinches, the motor starts to whirr and the print rolls physically out of the slot before gliding onto your photo shelf.

Slow development. Photos emerge milky and slightly green, then develop over roughly 18 seconds as saturation, contrast, brightness and sharpness gradually resolve.

Shake to develop. Shake the phone to hurry the chemistry along using Core Motion. In the Simulator, use ⌃⌘Z to trigger the same behaviour.

Sound and haptics in lockstep. Every sound cue is synthesised at runtime and synchronised with its corresponding haptic. Luma ships with no bundled audio assets.

Private by design. No accounts. No network connection. No analytics. No tracking.

Real captures can optionally be saved directly to the user’s photo library.

Running Luma

brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate
open Luma.xcodeproj

The deployment target is iOS 17.

On a physical device, Luma uses AVCaptureSession for the live viewfinder and photo capture.

In the Simulator, or when camera permission is unavailable, Luma falls back to a procedural dusk scene rendered using SwiftUI Canvas. The entire interaction can therefore be demonstrated without camera hardware.

The status chip shows:

• LIVE when using the physical camera
• DEMO when using the procedural scene

Audio in the Simulator

Simulator audio is routed through the host machine’s CoreAudio server. That server may be unavailable on headless or CI environments and can cause AVAudioEngine to hang.

Audio is therefore disabled by default when running Luma in the Simulator.

To enable it, add the following environment variable to the scheme:

LUMA_AUDIO=1

Audio is always enabled on a physical device.

Tests

LumaUITests drives the complete interaction:

drag → snap → eject → develop → focus

A screenshot is captured at each stage.

Run the suite with:

xcodebuild -project Luma.xcodeproj -scheme Luma \
  -destination 'platform=iOS Simulator,name=iPhone 16 Pro' test

Set LUMA_SHOT_DIR to write generated PNG screenshots somewhere outside the application container.

LumaTests covers detent snapping and development chemistry with no UI.

UI tests pass -luma-fast-chem so development takes about three seconds instead of 18. Production behaviour is unchanged.

Project layout

Luma/Sources
├── App/        app entry point
├── Camera/     AVFoundation capture, preview layer and procedural demo scene
├── Core/       synthesised audio, Core Haptics and shake detection
├── Models/     camera state machine and instant photo model
└── Views/      camera body, instant print card and composition

Luma recreates the behaviour and visual language demonstrated publicly for this style of instant-camera interaction. No proprietary source code was used.