Eli5, does the measurement app on the iPhone depend on how close or far you are from the object you’re measuring?

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Answer 1

Are you talking about measuring using the camera? If so, that’s using built-in LIDAR sensor some of the models have. A LIDAR sensor is like radar/sonar but using light, so the phone knows how far away something is with a decent degree of accuracy.

Now, many years ago there were camera measurement apps, but I believe you had to input how far away you were from the object and it only worked on objects that were a somewhat constant distance away from you (parallel planes, so it could tell you the height of a piece of wood standing up but not laying down), then using the known camera’s FOV, you just use trigonometry to figure out distance.