Do you remember 3D Touch? If you owned an iPhone between 2015 and 2018, you probably do. This feature was able to recognize how hard you pressed on the display, and in addition to quick menus or app previews, it also had one very unconventional use. Thanks to it, the iPhone could be turned into a fairly accurate digital scale.
3D Touch first appeared on the iPhone 6s and Apple subsequently implemented it in other models. It worked simply by having a special layer of sensors under the display that could measure the force of pressing. And it probably won't surprise you that developers very quickly discovered that this data could be used for more than just controlling the system. For example, applications and websites began to emerge that could convert pressure on the display into weight.
This is how 3D Touch worked
3d touch fb tip
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Switch appwith 3D touch
3D Touch FB
The most famous was the experiment with the Gravity web application, which worked directly in the browser. Safari. After a simple calibration, it was enough to place a coin, candy or other small object on the display and the website was able to display its approximate weight. Of course, the accuracy was not comparable to a laboratory scale, but for similar experiments the solution worked surprisingly well. I remember that I tested this option myself at the time and the difference in weighing on iPhone and on the kitchen digital scale it was in units of grams, which
In addition to web projects, applications were also created for App Store. They tried to turn the iPhone into an improvised pocket scale, which Apple was not very enthusiastic. Some applications therefore disappeared from the store quite quickly, because the company did not want users to use the device in a way that it was not intended for. However, the website was Apple of course, short, which is why these measurement options experienced a solid boom years ago.
However, in 2018 Apple began to move away from 3D Touch technology. First, it dropped it from the iPhone XR, and a year later, with the arrival of the iPhone 11 series iPhone 11 has disappeared completely. It has been replaced by technology Haptic Touch, which instead of measuring the force of pressing only works with the length of time the finger is held on the display. This is precisely why developers lost access to data on the force of pressure. Web experiments and applications that functioned as digital scales thus stopped making sense overnight and gradually disappeared. Nevertheless, this is one of the most interesting examples of how developers were able to use the hardware capabilities of the iPhone in a way that Apple probably didn't plan at all when designing this technology. And what about you, have you also played with weighing on iPhone? And if so, do you miss similar tricks in today's models?
