Re: [w3c/gamepad] spec vibrationActuator gamepad extension (#68)

> Old-style force feedback joysticks, which had super complicated APIs for creating and playing effects. I'm not sure if controllers like this are even manufactured anymore.

I'm not sure if flight and wheel joysticks still use these, as most of those use USB so latency isn't as much of an issue as it used to be. However, I think we may see a return to this with HD haptics, since the timing can be precise enough that having parametric effects might be useful. I think that may be beyond the scope of "gamepads", but with the way gamepads are being repurposed for VR and including other sensors, it's kinda hard to tell?

> The Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons, which have "HD rumble"

The Nintendo Switch API seems to expose "amplitude" and "frequency" versus a simple "low/high power level" like XInput. More info can be found at:

dekuNukem/Nintendo_Switch_Reverse_Engineering#7
dekuNukem/Nintendo_Switch_Reverse_Engineering#11
https://github.com/dekuNukem/Nintendo_Switch_Reverse_Engineering/blob/master/rumble_data_table.md

And there's Haptics/Protocol code (C++) at:

https://github.com/mfosse/JoyCon-Driver/blob/master/joycon-driver/include/Joycon.hpp

I could see that getting sort of "dumbed down" the same way the Steam API does it though, which would basically wedge it into working under the proposed API.

Returning to the spec, the use of "HapticActuator" versus "VibrationActuator" is a little confusing. Depending on how much future-proofing needs to happen in the spec, is it useful to make sure these terms are divided up correctly? Vibration is only one type of actuation, but this doesn't really take other mechanisms like temperature, pneumatics, etc into account, which could show up in the future. Not sure if that really needs to be accounted for though, and definitely don't want to turn this bug into bikeshedding around that.

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Received on Wednesday, 7 March 2018 20:33:22 UTC