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 3.0 models (ZED 2i and ZED Mini) stream both left and right images at high resolution and framerate, using most of the available USB 3.0 bandwidth. Even if a smartphone exposes a USB-C port, it cannot guarantee the sustained USB 3.0 bandwidth and power delivery required by the camera.
- The GMSL2 models (ZED X, ZED X Mini, ZED X Nano, and ZED X One) use the GMSL2 automotive interface, which is not available on smartphones at all; they require an NVIDIA Jetson host equipped with a ZED Link capture card. More information is available in 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 currently provides CUDA capabilities.
Recommended architecture for mobile integration
If you need to use ZED data in a mobile application, the supported approach is to connect the camera to a host device (a PC with an NVIDIA GPU, or an NVIDIA Jetson such as the ZED Box Mini) running the ZED SDK, and 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 streaming capabilities, and you can also use standard middleware such as ROS 2 or GStreamer to transport the data to your mobile client.