Use it free: instantly knowing your phone attitude

Abstract

The phone attitude is an essential input to many smartphone applications, which has been known very difficult to accurately estimate especially over long time. Based on in-depth understanding of the nature of the MEMS gyroscope and other IMU sensors commonly equipped on smartphones, we propose A3 - an accurate and automatic attitude detector for commodity smartphones. A3 primarily leverages the gyroscope, but intelligently incorporates the accelerometer and magnetometer to select the best sensing capabilities and derive the most accurate attitude estimation. Extensive experimental evaluation on various types of Android smartphones confirms the outstanding performance of A3. Compared with other existing solutions, A3 provides 3x improvement on the accuracy of attitude estimation.