Re: Proposal for ambient light

On 11/29/2011 6:58 AM, Robin Berjon wrote:
> On Nov 29, 2011, at 12:54 , Nilsson, Claes1 wrote:
>> An area of use cases where I don't think the CSS approach works is when we want to use the ambient light sensor on another device than the web application is running on, i.e. in connection with service discovery. For example, using the smart phone as a TV remote control and use the phone's ambient light sensor to control the contrast/light level on the TV.
> I'm not at all against finding new use cases — quite the contrary — but this one feels a bit far fetched :) I don't think I'd want the TV's contrast to change whenever my phone's moved around or someone walks next to it!
>
If we restrict ourselves to thinking about phones as being the only use 
case, then the applications are probably more limited. However, I don't 
see why this API should be restricted to phones. An advanced remote 
control for a TV (think a Harmony on steroids) might well want to know 
the ambient light level. In particular, an advanced remote control might 
well also control the room lights and/or window shades. Yes, you would 
want some significant filtering on the values returned by the ambient 
light sensor to prevent the 'person walking past' problem -- but that 
can easily be done in the Javascript.

I am hopeful that the sorts of APIs that we define will find their way 
into all sorts of devices -- even single purpose devices that just run a 
single "webapp".

Philip

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Philip Gladstone
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