Re: [deviceorientation] Add API for requesting permission to receive device motion / orientation events (#57)

@erikmchut Your points are valid wrt VR/AR usage. These changes would increase "motion sickness" considerably. 

However, the DeviceOrientation Events API is not the correct API to use to implement VR/AR. The fact it is used on WebKit-based browsers is because it currently provides the only way to access sensor data in those browsers. 

There are other/better APIs for Web VR/AR implementations available for implementation:

https://immersive-web.github.io/webvr/spec/1.1/
https://www.w3.org/TR/gyroscope/

The issue is that these APIs are not currently supported in WebKit. Instead of implementing those APIs, the proposals here suggest we instead modify/remove this existing API.

What I proposed above that we make `deviceorientation` and `devicemotion` un-fingerprintable and un-key-loggable by making it a source for lower resolution data right now. A lot of non-VR/AR use cases are also at risk here and, on implementation of the above specifications we would have the following scenario:

1. Low-resolution `deviceorientation` and `devicemotion` data, that eliminates fingerprinting or key-logging abilities remains available by default without permissions.
2. High-resolution sensor data is available via both the WebVR API and the Generic Sensors API (see above for links) with user permissions being acquired first.

This represents a way to keep things moving on a web page that need to move (e.g. motion parallax effects, custom gesture recognition, CSS animations attached to device pose, etc) with a path for developers to "upgrade" that default low-level data access to something suitable with the permission of users.

> If the stakes were lower, we would not feel the need to aggressively remove.

This is very damaging to every stakeholder concerned and a shock to the web standards system. I'm not aware of any other such widely used APIs receiving the same treatment previously. As such it feels unprecedented in the history of Web Standards to take such a drastic course of action instead of progressively fixing the issue.

-- 
GitHub Notification of comment by richtr
Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/deviceorientation/issues/57#issuecomment-459720772 using your GitHub account

Received on Friday, 1 February 2019 13:22:20 UTC