What the hell? Time to impact? How would they know what's under them and how far away it is? The camera is at an arbitrary angle and images would be unusable for ranging due to rotation etc. That makes no sense.
> The device would then use an onboard motor to reorient itself in order to protect fragile components like the screen or the camera when it hits the ground.
Okay, I could see this working. I spent years designing spacecraft attitude control system components that used this exact principle (the motor, not the screen hitting the ground).
> The device's on-board vibration motor could be employed, so it would even screech a little bit as it feel towards Earth, just like a cat.
That's gratuitous. My cat does NOT screech under any circumstances. The only times he's fallen an appreciable distance he was too busy flipping around to orient himself for landing.
“...What the hell? Time to impact? How would they know what’s under them and how far away it is? The camera is at an arbitrary angle and images would be unusable for ranging due to rotation etc. That makes no sense....”
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It just needs to know it’s in free-fall (32 feet per second per second acceleration) and doesn’t need to know when it will impact. The idea is NOT to achieve the “impact position” at the last possible instant but to, instead, achieve AND MAINTAIN that position quickly and then throughout the remainder of the fall (whether the fall is from 3 feet or 120 stories). That continuous maintenance of relative orientation of the falling iPhone is why it would take an interesting video if it was accidentally dropped from a skyscraper as happened in the linked article.
This may be yet another great feature headed to iPhones in the next year or two.