I have an idea for an iPhone game / app that needs to be able to track height position of the iPhone. I am new to iPhone development so I don't know how the accelerometer works. But the idea is that the user should place the iphone on a flat surface (with the iPhone back against the surface). The user will the lower and raise the surface periodically and the iPhone should be able to track this movement. We can assume that the surface will go back to its original position so we only care about how much it was lowered / raised from its original position during the movement.
The amount raised / lowered will be a few centimeters. Is this possible to track and how would you go about solving this?
Thank you very much for your help! Best regards, Lukas
This is not possible to track directly. However, the accelerometer data can be used to sort of do that. Acceleration is the time-derivative of speed, which is the time-derivative of position. By integrating the acceleration twice, you can track position.
Caveat though: this will probably not be very accurate, with significant drift errors.
Now you can also track orientation with the magnetometer, and you can use the camera to "watch" the environment. This suggests the possibility to fix the position by triangulation.
I don't expect that to be easy though.