I think he was mostly joking about it being for non-selfies. Depending on exact location, the accepted angles should be slightly less than 180 degrees in front

I think he was mostly joking about it being for non-selfies. Depending on exact location, the accepted angles should be slightly less than 180 degrees in front of the camera—you don't need to be anywhere near the subject, unless you got a fisheye mounted. It's just a bit silly that the default approach wasn't RF, rather than optical, even if they put receivers on all sides of the camera. Some new cameras have BLE though, which is nice and solves most problems (although I prefer physical remotes to poorly written apps).