Re: Gamepad scope

On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 12:51 AM, Sangwhan Moon <smoon@opera.com> wrote:
>
> On 2011/10/06, at 11:27 AM, Ted Mielczarek wrote:
>> * Accelerometer support (really neat, but need to get a feel for how
>> consistent it is across devices)
>
> The geolocation group has something similar to this here:
>
> http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source-orientation.html#deviceorientation
>
> Could be used as a starting point, but also having two specs doing very similar things
> will either result in duplicate work and/or fragmentation. Not sure if we want to go down
> that road.

We discussed this when it first came up. If we spec this we'll
definitely find a way to work with that existing spec. We certainly
don't want to reinvent the wheel, but we also can't entirely defer to
that spec since the use cases are slightly different. (Single
accelerometer in a device vs. multiple controllers with
accelerometers.)

>> * Rumble/vibration support
>
> Would be nice to have in a separate scope of gamepad, since force feedback can exist
> in a non-gamepad context. (i.e. force feedback + touch events for Bejeweled like games,
> or force feedback + orientation for driving games comes to mind)
>
> The catch is probably the fact that it's too minimal to cover in a separate spec (since, most
> of the implementations I've seen have only a handful of methods in the API) - although it
> seems like the Device API WG does have a separate Vibration API in their charter.
>
> Doesn't look like a lot of effort has been put into this particular subspec, maybe it's better to
> sync up early and make sure we don't duplicate work.

Yes, we should definitely sync up there. I have a colleague who's
prototyping a vibration API in Gecko[1], we've been in contact
already. I'll see if I can find someone in the Device API WG who's
interested in vibration support.

>> Things that we will definitely not spec:
>> * Wiimote pointer motion
>> * Camera sensors (including Kinect)
>
> I'll have to say that the elephant is in the room, when it comes to this and vibration.
>
> Probably worth taking a separate discussion about the elephant.

We had this discussion on a call (last week?). There are patent
concerns if we don't have a WG member that is involved in producing
the technology, first of all, and second, it's so different from
standard game controllers that the spec is unlikely to have much
overlap, so I think it's fair to keep this separate for now.

-Ted

1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679966

Received on Thursday, 6 October 2011 12:02:33 UTC