A phone is not a small workstation. It has a fraction of the memory and bandwidth, a GPU tuned for battery life over throughput, a driver stack that varies by vendor, and a thermal budget that throttles you the moment you stop paying attention. We build real 3D on that hardware, the kind that runs a whole-earth terrain engine or a full anatomical model on a device that fits in a pocket, and we have been doing it since before mobile GPUs were any good.
Real engines on OpenGL ES and Vulkan
Most of our mobile work is OpenGL ES, and increasingly Vulkan, running the same engines we ship on the desktop. Porting OpenSceneGraph and osgEarth to iOS and Android is not a recompile. It means fitting a desktop scene graph into mobile memory, replacing fixed-function paths, managing texture and tile budgets, and holding the frame rate when the device would rather throttle. Done right, the terrain that streamed on a workstation streams on a tablet.
What we have built on mobile
BioDigital Human is the 3D human-anatomy platform used across medical education and healthcare. We built the high-performance visualization engine behind its iPad app from scratch, on OpenSceneGraph and OpenGL ES 2, replacing an earlier game-engine implementation and giving it the speed to render detailed anatomy on a tablet.
We have put whole-earth osgEarth globes on mobile: real streamed terrain and imagery on a phone or tablet, not a flat slippy map. One of them, Tecnodidattica's Planet Earth, shipped on the App Store.
For Precog we helped build Skyline, an iPad-based glass-cockpit augmented-reality device that overlays synthetic-vision terrain, again on osgEarth, onto the pilot's view. To lock that synthetic terrain to the real world, we integrated a Stratux ADS-B and GPS receiver to capture the aircraft's pose accurately for the augmented-reality registration. Synthetic vision on a tablet is an unforgiving target. The terrain has to be correct, correlated, and drawn fast enough to be trusted in the cockpit.
Native iOS and Android
We work in the native stacks, Objective-C and Swift on iOS, Java, Kotlin, and the NDK on Android, and we cross the boundary between a C++ engine and the platform's UI, camera, sensors, and GPU. Mobile augmented reality through ARKit and ARCore, camera and sensor fusion, and the embedded-mobile targets that sit between a phone and a purpose-built device all live here.
Where it connects
Mobile is a constraint, not a domain, so it runs through the rest of our work: geospatial terrain on a tablet, biomedical visualization on an iPad, VR, AR, and xR on a headset or a phone, and the safety-critical discipline a cockpit device demands.
Who works on it
AlphaPixel is a US-owned small business, founded in 2004, with senior developers who have shipped 3D on iOS and Android since the platforms could barely manage it. DLA DD2345 / ITAR registered. We take closed-source defense work and open source alike, and we do not sell an app, so our advice is not a sales pitch for one.
Frequently asked questions
What kind of 3D can you run on phones and tablets?
Real engines, not toy demos: whole-earth terrain globes, detailed anatomical models, and synthetic-vision cockpit overlays, all on hardware that fits in a pocket. A phone has a fraction of a workstation's memory and bandwidth, a battery-tuned GPU, and a thermal budget that throttles you, and we build 3D that holds up inside those limits.
Do you port OpenSceneGraph and osgEarth to iOS and Android?
Yes, and it is not a recompile. It means fitting a desktop scene graph into mobile memory, replacing fixed-function paths, managing texture and tile budgets, and holding frame rate against thermal throttling. We have put streamed osgEarth globes and full scene graphs on phones and tablets.
Do you work in native iOS and Android, or only cross-platform?
Native. Objective-C and Swift on iOS, Java, Kotlin, and the NDK on Android, and we cross the boundary between a C++ engine and the platform's UI, camera, sensors, and GPU.
Can you build mobile augmented reality with ARKit and ARCore?
Yes. Mobile AR through ARKit and ARCore, camera and sensor fusion, and the embedded-mobile targets that sit between a phone and a purpose-built device are all part of this work.
How do you hold frame rate on a GPU that throttles?
By treating the constraint as the design problem: mobile memory and bandwidth budgets, streaming and level of detail so large terrain or scans stay responsive, and avoiding the fixed-function and desktop assumptions that quietly cost frames. Done right, terrain that streamed on a workstation streams on a tablet.
Have you shipped 3D apps to the App Store?
Yes. Examples include a 3D human-anatomy platform's iPad app, whose visualization engine we built from scratch on OpenSceneGraph and OpenGL ES 2, and a consumer 3D-globe app, built on osgEarth, that shipped on the App Store.
Do you build safety-critical mobile devices, like cockpit tools?
Yes. We helped build an iPad glass-cockpit device that overlays synthetic-vision terrain locked to aircraft pose. Synthetic vision on a tablet is unforgiving: the terrain has to be correct, correlated, and fast enough to trust, which is where mobile meets our safety-critical work.
How do we start a mobile 3D project?
Bring the target device, the data, and the performance you need, and we will scope the port or the new build. Contact us; mobile is a constraint that runs through geospatial, biomedical, and XR work, so the plan depends on which of those you are targeting.
Talk to us
Tell us what you’re building and where it’s stuck. We’ll tell you straight whether it’s something we can help with, and how we’d approach it.
Or see how we run consulting and software development engagements.
