What is a gyroscope?

We’re sure you may have read of the term gyroscope being thrown around as and when you have gone through smartphone feature lists. Chances are though, you never really paid attention to it, since it’s not generally a feature one looks for. However, does that mean it isn’t required? No. Far from it in fact. Read on to find out just what a gyroscope is, and why it is important.

A gyroscope is a wheel or disc that is attached on a gimbal and can rotate quickly around an axis, which can change direction. Therefore, even when a structure on which the gyroscope is placed is tilted, the spinning rotor maintains its orientation, owing to its angular momentum.

Applications of a gyroscope

In order to detect angular rotational velocity and acceleration, your smartphone has a gyroscope or gyro sensor. Simply explained, the gyroscope sense is what allows us to play the games that we do on our smartphones, tablets, and other devices which use motion sense.

The gyroscope is also what allows us to view 360-degree videos or photos on our smartphones. Due to its presence when we move our device, so does the photo or the video. Not just this. Gyroscopes are also used in Gimbals, which are handheld devices meant for a phones and cameras, which allows you to rotate them around an axis. They have applications in vlogging, filmmaking and more. 

Interestingly, gyroscopes are not just used in everyday electronics. For example, they are also found in altimeters, which are used in aircraft to calculate position and altitude.   

A circuit that can determine the location of a smartphone in three dimensions is used to provide orientation information for the same. It was therefore necessary to develop a circuit that could measure this data and be made compact enough to fit within the smartphone.

Due to its ability to determine its position in three dimensions to correspond to our position in space, smartphones with gyroscopes are better sensing devices. As a result, the smartphone improves as a hand-held device and becomes more functional since it “understands” how we are handling it.