Is the iPhone more powerful than Apple thinks? A new video posted by Ivo Leko shows how you can use all the sensors packed into your iPhone to do real-time tracking of a magnet’s position, which he explains has all kinds of cool potential future applications.
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In the video, Leko explains how your iPhone’s magnetometer, accelerometer and microphone can be used together to track the position of a magnet on a piece of paper. As you’ll see below, iPhone can track the magnet in both two and three dimensions so that when you lift it off the paper, the tracking cursor on your iPhone’s display goes from being solid black to lighter shades of gray the further away it moves from the surface.
“OK,” you might be saying, “this is a neat trick… but so what?”
At the end of the video, Leko explains that this technology can be used for future accessories and applications such as magnetized gloves that can let you type things out on a virtual keyboard, magnet-enabled game controllers for your phone, gesture detectors and, yes, a magnetic stylus you can use for Galaxy Note-style writing and drawing. Leko himself demonstrates a prototype for how such a stylus would work at the end of the video, though we’re sure the thought of bringing a stylus to the iPhone would have made the late Steve Jobs cringe.
