People ride a rollercoaster at Thorpe Park, in Surrey
(Picture: PA)One of the iPhone 14’s flagship features is causing trouble across the Atlantic.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the crash detection safety feature introduced on the iPhone 14 and the new generation of Apple watches is being triggered by the extreme acceleration and jolts of rollercoasters, making erroneous automated calls to 911 and emergency contacts as a result.
Since the iPhone 14 went on sale, the 911 dispatch center near Kings Island amusement park has received at least six phones calls saying:
— Joanna Stern (@JoannaStern) October 9, 2022
“The owner of this iPhone was in a severe car crash...”
Except, the owner was just on a roller coaster.
🆕 by me: https://t.co/hp1fHZBIf6 pic.twitter.com/i0lZPoWzGz
This has resulted in emergency services wasting their time on a false crash report on at least one occasion, and family members needlessly worried, according to the Journal.
Could the same thing happen on rollercoasters at Alton Towers, Thorpe Park, and the dozens of smaller parks around the UK?
The Standard asked Brendan Walker, CEO of VR ride maker Studio Go Go and rollercoaster expert, whether 999 operators should brace themselves for similar false positives. His verdict? “Fairly probable.”
Sudden changes to velocity and acceleration “play out in six degrees of freedom on a rollercoaster,” meaning that there are “many ways to raise alarm bells”, he explains.
In the Wall Street Journal report, two rollercoasters are named as triggering crash detection: Mystic Timbers at the King’s Island park outside of Cincinnati, and the Joker at Six Flags, California. Is there anything comparable to these in the UK?
Mystic Timbers, Walker says, jolts the rider quite a bit due to its old-school wooden construction. A parallel in the UK would be Megafobia at the Oakwood theme park in Wales. “It’s hailed by the Roller Coaster Club of Great Britain to be the best coaster in the UK for exactly these reasons,” Walker says.
Walker also worked on another wooden coaster at Alton Towers called Wicker Man, but this is less of a direct parallel. “I think that’s too smooth to give similar jolts that I suspect is the feature setting off the crash detection,” he says.
As for the Joker, it’s a very different kettle of fish. It’s a so-called ‘wing coaster’, with seats out to the side, but unusually the seats also rotate. This “can create a whipping action which is hard to predict or replicate on demand,” Walker says.
“The only winged coaster in the UK is Swarm at Thorpe Park, but it doesn’t have freely rotating seats,” he continues. “The ride where I think you’re most likely to get similar forces is the Booster fairground ride, which has freely rotating seats, but on long rotating arms, rather than on a track.”
Apple, for its part, says it will improve the feature over time, and you would imagine this would be fairly easy to correct, by simply blocking the GPS co-ordinates of major theme parks.
And for minor ones? “Apple could simply add a line that says, ‘If I’ve just gone up an incline over 45 degrees, or just rotated 360 degrees, then ignore crash detection for the next five minutes’,” Walker suggests.
“Of course, that may rule out some air disasters, but if your airplane is behaving like that, I suspect it’ll be too late.”
Ultimately, Walker believes it shouldn’t be too much trouble for Apple’s engineers to learn the difference between a crash and a ride, given his experience of using accelerometers in VR headsets to know where a thrillseeker is on a track.
“If Studio Go Go can detect when a rider’s supposed to be having fun on a ride, rather than in a horrific accident, then I’d hope Apple will eventually be able to do the same,” he concludes. “If they can’t, I’d be happy to take their call.”
