Smartphone assisted fieldwork: Towards the digital transition of geoscience fieldwork using LiDAR-equipped iPhones

Major advances in smartphones and tablets in terms of their built-in sensors (esp.cameras), available computational power and on-board memory are transforming the role of such devices into the key digital platform around which geological fieldwork is redesigning itself.This digital transition is changing how geoscientists collect and share multimodal-in some cases may be considered overly crude for detailed interrogation, particularly where the fidelity of the surface reconstruction is critical to the analysis (e.g.mesh facet orientation estimation).Based on our review of the evolution of digital field acquisition technologies and on our extensive field testing of the sensor suite integrated within the iPhone 12 Pro, it is clear that the digital transition of geological fieldwork is already mature, whereby smartphone devices have become as indispensable in the field as the geologists' traditional hammer and hand lens.