Re: Screen Orientation Feedback
Alternatively we could have a unit quaternion representation instead of screenAlpha/screenBeta/screenGamma. Given that webapps tend to convert the euler angle representation to something that is easier to compose anyway. As already mentioned by Rich the angle representations currently differ somewhat between browsers: Safari uses different ranges for beta, gamma and there are some issues with Firefox which does not seem to report the correct angles for some orientations. Unit quaternions are less ambiguous since each rotation can be represented by either unit quaternion q or -q. Tim On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 10:52 PM, Jonas Sicking jo...@sicking.cc wrote: On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 1:38 AM, Rich Tibbett ri...@opera.com wrote: Do you have any thoughts on providing screen-adjusted devicemotion event data also (i.e. acceleration, accelerationIncludingGravity, rotationRate) It's not something I've thought about, but yeah, it sounds like that would make sense. / Jonas
Re: Screen Orientation Feedback
If only someone had pointed out these problems earlier ;)
On Aug 5, 2014 11:17 PM, Jonas Sicking jo...@sicking.cc wrote:
Hi All,
I think the current interaction between the screen orientation and
device orientation specs is really unfortunate.
Any time that you use the device orientation in order to render
something on screen, you have to do non-obvious math in order to get
coordinates which are usable. Same thing if you want to use the device
orientation events as input for objects which are rendered on screen.
I would argue that these are the by far most common use cases for
I agree that the main problem here is that the deviceorientation spec
defined that their events should be relative to the device rather than
to the screen. However we can still fix the problem by simply adding
partial interface DeviceOrientationEvent
{
readonly attribute double? screenAlpha;
readonly attribute double? screenBeta;
readonly attribute double? screenGamma;
}
No new events needs to be defined.
I guess we can argue that this should be added to the
DeviceOrientation spec, but that seems unlikely to happen in practice
anytime soon. I think we would do developers a disservice by blaming
procedural issues rather than trying to solve the problem.
I think mozilla would be happy to implement such an addition to the
DeviceOrientation event (I'm currently checking to make sure). Are
there other UAs that have opinions (positive or negative) to such an
addition?
/ Jonas
Re: Screen Orientation Feedback
Yup. Well.. sounds like people, including you, pointed out these
problems. No idea why it was ignored since I wasn't there.
/ Jonas
On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 11:28 PM, Lars Knudsen lar...@gmail.com wrote:
If only someone had pointed out these problems earlier ;)
On Aug 5, 2014 11:17 PM, Jonas Sicking jo...@sicking.cc wrote:
Hi All,
I think the current interaction between the screen orientation and
device orientation specs is really unfortunate.
Any time that you use the device orientation in order to render
something on screen, you have to do non-obvious math in order to get
coordinates which are usable. Same thing if you want to use the device
orientation events as input for objects which are rendered on screen.
I would argue that these are the by far most common use cases for
I agree that the main problem here is that the deviceorientation spec
defined that their events should be relative to the device rather than
to the screen. However we can still fix the problem by simply adding
partial interface DeviceOrientationEvent
{
readonly attribute double? screenAlpha;
readonly attribute double? screenBeta;
readonly attribute double? screenGamma;
}
No new events needs to be defined.
I guess we can argue that this should be added to the
DeviceOrientation spec, but that seems unlikely to happen in practice
anytime soon. I think we would do developers a disservice by blaming
procedural issues rather than trying to solve the problem.
I think mozilla would be happy to implement such an addition to the
DeviceOrientation event (I'm currently checking to make sure). Are
there other UAs that have opinions (positive or negative) to such an
addition?
/ Jonas
Re: Screen Orientation Feedback
On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 9:59 PM, Jonas Sicking jo...@sicking.cc wrote: On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 5:35 AM, Rich Tibbett ri...@opera.com wrote: On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 11:33 PM, Jonas Sicking jo...@sicking.cc wrote: I'm not arguing that we remove the relative angle that's in the spec right now. I'm arguing that for device orientation events, we should provide coordinates relative to the screen as well. This topic was filed as an issue against the DeviceOrientation spec in March (https://github.com/w3c/deviceorientation/issues/4). Interest from implementers is a strong indicator to proceed with such spec additions. Active implementer engagement around spec clarifications and additions is quite low right now. Cool, if we can have this added to an updated DeviceOrientation spec then that's definitely the best solution here. Though the issue above seems to suggest that the spec would define that the existing alpha/beta/gamma properties would be redefined to be screen-relative rather than device relative. Is that really going to be web compatible? I don't think mozilla would feel comfortable leading with such a change given our limited influence for mobile content. But if browsers with bigger mobile marketshare make such a change we'd definitely follow. Do you have any indication that there's interest in that? A safer option seems to be to introduce screenAlpha/screenBeta/screenGamma (or something similarly named) and make those relative to the screen. Sounds good to me. That is something that I'm fairly sure I can make happen in Gecko. OK. I believe we could implement these properties in Chromium based on this intent (pending following the correct process there of course). Do you have any thoughts on providing screen-adjusted devicemotion event data also (i.e. acceleration, accelerationIncludingGravity, rotationRate) or do you plan to just stick to providing screen-adjusted deviceorientation event data for now? - Rich / Jonas
Re: Screen Orientation Feedback
On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 1:38 AM, Rich Tibbett ri...@opera.com wrote: Do you have any thoughts on providing screen-adjusted devicemotion event data also (i.e. acceleration, accelerationIncludingGravity, rotationRate) It's not something I've thought about, but yeah, it sounds like that would make sense. / Jonas
Re: Screen Orientation Feedback
On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 11:33 PM, Jonas Sicking jo...@sicking.cc wrote: On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 6:44 AM, Mounir Lamouri mou...@lamouri.fr wrote: Maybe this feedback should be more for DeviceOrientation than Screen Orientation. There has been a few discussions there (public-geolocation). This is the type of procedural issues that I'd really rather not get caught in. I think it's fine to defer to the DeviceOrientation spec, but only if we think there's any chance of it getting added there anytime soon. Given that no drafts, to my knowledge, has been published for a DeviceOrientation v2, that does not seem to be the case. Anyway. I am not convinced that adding new properties will really fix how developers handle this. I asked around and it seems that native platforms do not expose Device Orientation relative to the screen. I am not sure why we should expose something different on the Web platform. I don't think the fact that other platforms do not supply screen relative orientation events is a strong technical argument for why we shouldn't. I'm definitely in favor of looking at what other platforms do, but not with the mindset that what other platforms do is the right thing to do, but rather to see if they have good solutions that we could learn from. Surely other platforms will make design mistakes, just like we do. I think we should work on providing developers the right tools in order for them to do the right thing. I totally agree with this. For all the use cases that I can think of for getting the coordinates relative to the screen is more important than relative to the device. This includes: * A navigation page which shows a map as well as how the device is oriented relative to the map. * A navigation page which shows a map orientated so that the on-screen map matches real world. * A game where an in-game character is controlled by tilting the device left and right to make the character walk left vs. right. I'm sure there are use cases where you need to know the orientation relative to the device rather than relative to the screen, they just seem to be less common to me. Given that, the right tool seems to be to provide the DeviceOrientation events relative to the screen and allow them to be compensated to be relative to the device if needed. Sadly it's too late for that. Authors already have the wrong tool as a default since the DeviceOrientation spec is written and implemented the way it is. However we can at least give authors the right tool as well, by introducing screeAlpha etc. For example, without the Screen Orientation API, they do not know the relative angle between the device natural orientation and the screen. This API is not yet widely available. Some version of it ships in Firefox and IE but is prefixed. It should be in Chrome Beta soon. I don't think the right tool to do the right thing in this case means give them coordinates in a coordinate system that they don't want, and then give them enough information to transform the coordinate into the coordinate system that they do want. I'm not arguing that we remove the relative angle that's in the spec right now. I'm arguing that for device orientation events, we should provide coordinates relative to the screen as well. This topic was filed as an issue against the DeviceOrientation spec in March (https://github.com/w3c/deviceorientation/issues/4). Interest from implementers is a strong indicator to proceed with such spec additions. Active implementer engagement around spec clarifications and additions is quite low right now. / Jonas
Re: Screen Orientation Feedback
On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 6:44 AM, Mounir Lamouri mou...@lamouri.fr wrote: Maybe this feedback should be more for DeviceOrientation than Screen Orientation. There has been a few discussions there (public-geolocation). This is the type of procedural issues that I'd really rather not get caught in. I think it's fine to defer to the DeviceOrientation spec, but only if we think there's any chance of it getting added there anytime soon. Given that no drafts, to my knowledge, has been published for a DeviceOrientation v2, that does not seem to be the case. Anyway. I am not convinced that adding new properties will really fix how developers handle this. I asked around and it seems that native platforms do not expose Device Orientation relative to the screen. I am not sure why we should expose something different on the Web platform. I don't think the fact that other platforms do not supply screen relative orientation events is a strong technical argument for why we shouldn't. I'm definitely in favor of looking at what other platforms do, but not with the mindset that what other platforms do is the right thing to do, but rather to see if they have good solutions that we could learn from. Surely other platforms will make design mistakes, just like we do. I think we should work on providing developers the right tools in order for them to do the right thing. I totally agree with this. For all the use cases that I can think of for getting the coordinates relative to the screen is more important than relative to the device. This includes: * A navigation page which shows a map as well as how the device is oriented relative to the map. * A navigation page which shows a map orientated so that the on-screen map matches real world. * A game where an in-game character is controlled by tilting the device left and right to make the character walk left vs. right. I'm sure there are use cases where you need to know the orientation relative to the device rather than relative to the screen, they just seem to be less common to me. Given that, the right tool seems to be to provide the DeviceOrientation events relative to the screen and allow them to be compensated to be relative to the device if needed. Sadly it's too late for that. Authors already have the wrong tool as a default since the DeviceOrientation spec is written and implemented the way it is. However we can at least give authors the right tool as well, by introducing screeAlpha etc. For example, without the Screen Orientation API, they do not know the relative angle between the device natural orientation and the screen. This API is not yet widely available. Some version of it ships in Firefox and IE but is prefixed. It should be in Chrome Beta soon. I don't think the right tool to do the right thing in this case means give them coordinates in a coordinate system that they don't want, and then give them enough information to transform the coordinate into the coordinate system that they do want. I'm not arguing that we remove the relative angle that's in the spec right now. I'm arguing that for device orientation events, we should provide coordinates relative to the screen as well. / Jonas
Re: Screen Orientation Feedback
+ri...@opera.com
On Wed, 6 Aug 2014, at 07:14, Jonas Sicking wrote:
Hi All,
I think the current interaction between the screen orientation and
device orientation specs is really unfortunate.
Any time that you use the device orientation in order to render
something on screen, you have to do non-obvious math in order to get
coordinates which are usable. Same thing if you want to use the device
orientation events as input for objects which are rendered on screen.
I would argue that these are the by far most common use cases for
I agree that the main problem here is that the deviceorientation spec
defined that their events should be relative to the device rather than
to the screen. However we can still fix the problem by simply adding
partial interface DeviceOrientationEvent
{
readonly attribute double? screenAlpha;
readonly attribute double? screenBeta;
readonly attribute double? screenGamma;
}
No new events needs to be defined.
I guess we can argue that this should be added to the
DeviceOrientation spec, but that seems unlikely to happen in practice
anytime soon. I think we would do developers a disservice by blaming
procedural issues rather than trying to solve the problem.
I think mozilla would be happy to implement such an addition to the
DeviceOrientation event (I'm currently checking to make sure). Are
there other UAs that have opinions (positive or negative) to such an
addition?
Maybe this feedback should be more for DeviceOrientation than Screen
Orientation. There has been a few discussions there
(public-geolocation).
Anyway. I am not convinced that adding new properties will really fix
how developers handle this. I asked around and it seems that native
platforms do not expose Device Orientation relative to the screen. I am
not sure why we should expose something different on the Web platform. I
think we should work on providing developers the right tools in order
for them to do the right thing. For example, without the Screen
Orientation API, they do not know the relative angle between the device
natural orientation and the screen. This API is not yet widely
available. Some version of it ships in Firefox and IE but is prefixed.
It should be in Chrome Beta soon.
In addition, Tim Volodine recently suggested (in public-geolocation)
that we could add a quaternion representation of the device orientation.
If we could introduce quaternions to the platform and offer tools to do
simple math operations on them, we could narrow the complexity of going
from the device origin to the screen origin to one operation.
Finally, my understanding is that the biggest problem with
DeviceOrientation isn't that the orientation is relative to the device
instead of the screen but the rather high incompatibility. Rich Tibbett
made a great VR demo [1] using DeviceOrientation. I had the chance to
chat with him and he told me that he faced a lot of problems with angles
being very different depending on the device, and the browser. Actually,
I tried to show the demo to a colleague a few days after on an old Nexus
7 and it was completely busted.
The number one problem we should tackle with DeviceOrientation is the
interop issue. The API is currently worthless because if you write it
for one browser on one device, the chance of it working as expected on
another device or browser are fairly low. It is a shame for example that
even Chrome and Firefox running on Android do not have full
interoperability. We should start by working together toward a fully
interoperable implementation (at least for browsers running on Android).
Then we should figure out why some devices are outliers.
[1] http://richtr.github.io/threeVR/examples/vr_basic.html
-- Mounir
Screen Orientation Feedback
Hi All,
I think the current interaction between the screen orientation and
device orientation specs is really unfortunate.
Any time that you use the device orientation in order to render
something on screen, you have to do non-obvious math in order to get
coordinates which are usable. Same thing if you want to use the device
orientation events as input for objects which are rendered on screen.
I would argue that these are the by far most common use cases for
I agree that the main problem here is that the deviceorientation spec
defined that their events should be relative to the device rather than
to the screen. However we can still fix the problem by simply adding
partial interface DeviceOrientationEvent
{
readonly attribute double? screenAlpha;
readonly attribute double? screenBeta;
readonly attribute double? screenGamma;
}
No new events needs to be defined.
I guess we can argue that this should be added to the
DeviceOrientation spec, but that seems unlikely to happen in practice
anytime soon. I think we would do developers a disservice by blaming
procedural issues rather than trying to solve the problem.
I think mozilla would be happy to implement such an addition to the
DeviceOrientation event (I'm currently checking to make sure). Are
there other UAs that have opinions (positive or negative) to such an
addition?
/ Jonas
