I’ve been playing around with CoreMotion since it is frankly so cool. I’ve followed NSHipster’s CMDevice​Motion post, but I made some changes to use the latest Swift v3.1. Below is sample code for using both the gyroscope and accelerometer to keep an image level when you rotate your phone.

//
//  ViewController.swift
//
//  Created by Rex on 4/22/17.
//

import UIKit
import CoreMotion

class ViewController: UIViewController {

    let interval = 0.01
    let imageFilename = "bg.jpg"
    let imageWidth = CGFloat(800)
    let imageHeight = CGFloat(1200)
    
    let manager = CMMotionManager()
    var imageView: UIImageView?

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()

        guard manager.isDeviceMotionAvailable else { return }
        
        setImageView()
        
        manager.deviceMotionUpdateInterval = interval
        let queue = OperationQueue()
        
        manager.startDeviceMotionUpdates(to: queue, withHandler: {(data, error) in
            guard let data = data else { return }
            let gravity = data.gravity
            let rotation = atan2(gravity.x, gravity.y) - .pi

            OperationQueue.main.addOperation {
                self.imageView?.transform = CGAffineTransform(rotationAngle: CGFloat(rotation))
            }
        })
    }
    
    func setImageView() {
        if let img = UIImage(named: imageFilename) {
            let iv = UIImageView(image: img)

            // center the image
            let x = (self.view.frame.width/2)-(imageWidth/2)
            let y = (self.view.frame.height/2)-(imageHeight/2)
            iv.frame = CGRect(x: x, y: y, width: imageWidth, height: imageHeight)
            
            self.view.addSubview(iv)
            self.imageView = iv
        }
    }
    
}

The setup is simple. Create a new Single View Application project in Xcode. You’ll need to add a JPG to the Assets.xcassets folder in the project. Replace the Viewcontroller with the code below and make sure to update the image filename, width, and height constants.

The code hopefully is straightforward. We make sure the CMMotionManager’s device motion is available. Then, we add the imageview (as the only UIView element we’re adding to the screen). We use an OperationQueue to process the rotation calculation off the main queue. Then we update the imageview with a transform on the main queue.