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Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of which, these seem like the kind of thing that would integrate well, but cell phones are still stuck with gyros/accelerometers/magnetometers that are pretty bad, especially in cities, double especially near buried power lines. The old "my heading spins rapidly in circles whenever I walk on a certain section of sidewalk" problem. Are there engineering challenges to integration or is it a spooky controlled technology conspiracy?

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IIRC it's a size and power thing. You can emulate most of what a ring laser gyro does with good accelerometers and that's the better choice for most devices needing long battery life and compact size. Ring laser gyros (while small) are not that small last I checked. A quick google shows you can get them in about the size of a pocket watch. So potentially a good case addon for those that need it without the cost/power usage issues that would hit those that don't.

By "integration" I meant "turn the module into a chip" rather than "put the module in a phone" -- though your point about power could be the answer. Some lasers and optics just feel like the kind of thing that a clever team could squeeze onto a wafer, maybe with a loop in the third dimension. Or maybe just require two of them. There's probably a good answer as to why that's harder than it seems, I just don't know what it is.

It looks like there is work in that direction... but like most things it's 10years (TM) away.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-018-0266-5 https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/tiny-laser-gyroscope...

Cool, thanks for the links!

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