If you’ve ever used the Measure app on the iPhone, you’ll know that it’s a neat example of Augmented Reality (AR), where the phone’s camera view is overlaid with data. In the case of Measure, it’s a virtual tape measure that appears between multiple real-world points.
Now, certain iPhones have an extra string to their bow in Measure. As spotted by Joe Rossignol at MacRumors, you can now measure people’s heights, instantly and easily. At last, you can put paid to those arguments of how much taller one friend is than another.
Actually, it’s quite fun to do. Here’s how.
Open the Measure app on one of the following iPhones: iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 12 Pro Max, iPhone 13 Pro, iPhone 13 Pro Max, iPhone 14 Pro or iPhone 14 Pro Max. The thing all these phones have in common, which is what you need to perform this party trick, is they have a LiDAR scanner in the rear camera set-up.
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Point the iPhone at the person whose height you want to determine—I have only been able to make this work with the iPhone in portrait orientation, not landscape, though to be fair my subject got fed up with the photographic attention after a while and left. But my belief is you need to be holding the iPhone upright.
The person needs to be completely visible in the frame, from top to toe, like the complete picture to the right rather than the cropped version at the head of this post. After a second, the app realizes it’s looking at a person and a white dotted line appears to the side of their head, scrolling upwards slowly with a measurement alongside. When it reaches the top, the line becomes solid and the final height is locked in.
Whether that height is set as feet and inches or centimeters depends on whether you’ve set the app to measure in imperial or metric units, which you can adjust by opening Settings and tapping Measure.
You can see the height of people when they’re sitting down, too (frankly rather less useful, I’d say) and the app counts them to the very top, including big hair, for instance, or a hat.
It’s a tiny feature, but it’s quite satisfying to use. But be warned, don’t be surprised when people object that they are 5 feet 11 as they’ve always claimed, thank you very much, not the 5 feet 10 that stupid app says. If they do say something like that, just smile and say, “Well, size isn’t everything.”