Re: [orientation-sensor] Head orientation tracking (#68)

My first instinct is that spacial audio should be supported by Web Audio and other web media playback APIs so that browsers and operating systems can handle integrating input from the IMU on behalf of the page. I understand however that in a developing field there may not be sufficient standards to completely offload this processing and so allowing the developer to implement their own audio processing is the faster route. This feels similar to the transition that has happened for WebXR, which was originally built using polyfills processing IMU input from existing sensor APIs. Now WebXR is part of the browser engine which has the benefit of simplifying the code that must be provided by developers and improving user privacy by not exposing as much sensor information directly to the page.

Putting my implementer hat on I would rather not include custom code for supporting the embedded IMUs in various headsets. We have a similar problem with the Gamepad API and much prefer it when operating systems provide a consistent API so that the browser doesn't have to implement device-specific support as that greatly limits the number of devices we can officially support. Given that, unless operating systems recognize these IMUs as sensors, from an implementation perspective, I would recommend exploring polyfilling an `OrientationSensor` object using APIs like Web Bluetooth as suggested by @anssiko.

From a standards perspective then it seems like it would be useful to specify a `HeadOrientationSensor`, `OrientationSensor({ 'position': 'head' })`, or similar so that the behavior of libraries providing such sensors can be consistent across implementations.

CC Web Audio WG co-chair @hoch.

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Received on Friday, 3 December 2021 18:47:31 UTC