Can the ZED cameras connect directly to a smartphone? Can I develop an Android application to use with it?

No, ZED cameras cannot be connected directly to a smartphone, and the ZED SDK is not available for Android or iOS.

There are two main reasons:

1. Hardware interface

• The USB 3 cameras (ZED 2i and ZED Mini) stream both left and right images at high resolution and frame rate, using most of the available USB 3 bandwidth. Even if a smartphone has a USB-C port, it cannot guarantee the sustained USB 3 bandwidth and power delivery required by the camera.

• The GMSL2 cameras (ZED X, ZED X Mini, ZED X Nano, and the ZED X One family) use the GMSL2 automotive interface, which is not available on smartphones; they require an NVIDIA® Jetson™ host with a ZED Link capture card, or a ZED Box. See the ZED X documentation.

2. Processing requirements

The ZED SDK requires an NVIDIA® GPU with CUDA support to perform real-time stereo depth estimation, positional tracking, and the other AI features; no smartphone provides CUDA capabilities.

Recommended architecture for mobile integration

To use ZED data in a mobile application, connect the camera to a host device running the ZED SDK (a PC with an NVIDIA® GPU, or an NVIDIA® Jetson™ device such as the ZED Box Mini), then stream the results (images, depth, tracking data, detections) to your Android or iOS app over the network. The ZED SDK provides built-in local network streaming, and you can also use standard middleware such as ROS 2 or GStreamer to send the data to your mobile client.