International Business Times:
A future iPhone could protect itself from falls by using the vibration motor to adjust its centre of gravity, meaning smashed screens may be a thing of the future-past.
A patent awarded to Apple by the US Patent and Trademark Office this week, describes a “protective mechanism for an electronic device” and calls on the iPhone’s processing power to recognise a fall, calculate the potential impact, and work at lightening speed to come up with a plan to save the fragile glass screen.
Once the phone’s speed of descent, time to impact and any degrees of spin have been calculated using the accelerometer and gyroscope already fitted to current iPhones, the system then calls on the vibration motor to fire, which shifts the handset’s centre of gravity, countering the spin and ensuring it lands screen-up.
Fantastic. Like a cat!
As nifty as this would be I kinda hope they don’t do it if only to spare us the endless ‘vibegate’ posts when some berk throws their phone at the ground to demonstrate this feature and there isn’t time to sort out the flip!
You beat me to it; exactly what I was thinking!
As wonderful as this would be, it seems to me it’s harder than it sounds. How can the phone calculate its “time to impact” when it doesn’t know what height it’s been dropped from? A fall from a 6′ tall man’s ear and a fall from a 5′ tall woman’s purse will have very different fall times…
id put more faith in the creators of the patent tech than a website that wrote about it.