Secrets of Your Device

Secrets of Your Device is a museum of what the device in your hand is sensing right now. Every number on screen is a live reading taken at that moment. There is no simulation and nothing computed to stand in for a measurement. Which means nothing happens in this app unless you physically move the device. ■ Nine rooms • Accelerometer: why it reads 1.0 G while sitting still. Tilt to settle the ball in the centre • Gyroscope: it measures the rate of turning, not the direction. Turn exactly 90 degrees • Barometer: height from the weight of the air. Measure a building's height per floor • Magnetometer: hunt for magnets in the room, and see why a heading needs gravity too • Depth camera: how far away is that. How LiDAR and TrueDepth differ • Light: the ambient light sensor is out of reach, so the camera's exposure becomes a light meter • Radio: the Bluetooth signals in the air. Pick one device and walk towards it • Positioning: how finely a position can be fixed, and which digits of it mean anything • Neural Engine: hand it any prompt and measure how fast the answer arrives Each room runs in four stages: a 30-second brief, free observation of the raw values, a mission you complete by moving, and a card explaining why the readings come out that way. ■ The panel Every sensor on one screen, with the readings that come from a single part kept separate from the ones that only appear when parts work together. Each instrument shows which parts it uses. Arrange and hide them as you like. ■ Your device chart Walking the rooms fills in a record of your device: the parts it carries, how much each sensor wanders at rest (and therefore how many digits you can trust), and the trips you have measured up and down. ■ "Not in this model" is an exhibit too Two devices running the same iOS can hold different parts. Rooms your device cannot run are never hidden — what is missing is shown as well, because the differences between devices are part of the subject. ■ No network No account, no ads, no analytics. Camera images, device names and coordinates are never stored or sent. The app has no networking at all and works entirely offline.