"Your phone knows its position in space"

Mistakes happen, but in a video about gyroscopes it's hard to forgive mistaking position and orientation. That's the kind of thing that warrants a delete and re-upload.

> "Your phone knows its position in space"

This is not wrong at the pop sci level of the video.

Your phone undoubtedly has a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer all in a single IMU IC. Data from this IMU can be used to create a position cloud.

Add in some other sensor data to help collapse the position cloud, and your phone absolutely knows its position in space. Incidentally part of why IMU have magnetometers is that it’s basically one more sensor data to help collapse position clouds from just the orientation and acceleration data.

I think the only leap is how precise your phone would be with only gyroscopes generating orientation and acceleration data. But the video sort of hints at this when talking about the first rocket design using this data.

Later in the video it correctly uses ‘movement in space’ (showing changing (x,y,z)) and ‘orientation’ separately when talking about use of accels and gyros respectively. The ‘position’ in the introduction is glossing over this before getting into details. You could argue with the presentation decision, but it’s not ignorance.

The video talks about accels in a few places, and how they are required for pose estimates.

Doesn’t the phone need to know the orientation to measure the position (along with acceleration and possibly magnetic field strength and dir)?

It's the new age of illiteracy. Few people seem to care about the fact that words have meaning. I cannot be the only one noticing a downward trend here and I'm talking about real life and not some social media slop discussions.

On this note, thank you for pointing it out.