An Apple invention discovered on Thursday describes a system that could potentially save the most fragile components of an iPhone, such as the glass screen, by detecting when a device is falling and shifting the handset’s center of mass to control its landing.
I love this. To summarise, although I recommend you read the article, Apple are looking at multiple ways of not just negating the impact of a fall but from preventing the fall from happening altogether.
The idea that your device is not only smart enough to know when it’s falling, but also smart enough to know how best to counter that is really quite interesting. If it’s attached to a charger or headphone cable, the patent talks of “gripping” the plug to prevent the fall. If it’s already falling it talks of either shifting the centre of weight of the device so that the phone lands in a position less likely to cause catastrophic damage or, and tell me this wouldn’t be cool, deploy foils or discharge gas to alter the descent.
I can’t wait to see this in action.