Re: [gamepad] Haptic Feedback/Controller Vibration

Mozilla has played around with gamepad vibration a bit already:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=680289
There's been some mixed messages, but so far the basic idea seems to be to
either extend the existing Vibration
API<http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-vibration-20140211/>to handle
multiple motors (and presumably associate it back to a specific
pad) or to add a very similar looking "vibrate" function to the gamepad
API. Something like:

vibrate(int motorIndex, float intensity);

Personally I think that there's got to be a little more to it than that.
For one, you'll want to be able to query not only how many motors a device
has but have a way of expressing what type of feedback that motor provides
(is it a heavy motor, etc.) and possibly some description of it's locality
(The Xbox One controller has motors in each trigger, and the Steam
controller has motors under each touchpad.) I have no idea how to concisely
and robustly communicate that information. This also assumes that the
device has simple X-Input style feedback, not the more complicated joystick
force feedback that was all the rage in the 90s. (Which is far more
complicated and fairly dead, so I doubt it's worth addressing at all.)

As for controller speakers, I see the argument that it's a type of
controller feedback, but I don't think it should be conflated with
controller vibration. I see them as two very distinct features. It *is* an
interesting feature to consider on it's own, though.



On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 11:19 AM, Patrick Martin <patrick.martin.r@gmail.com
> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Is there a reason that haptic feedback support is missing from the gamepad
> api? I feel that this would prevent developers from fully utilizing modern
> gamepads which nearly always include some form of a haptic feedback
> mechanism, (from the speaker on the wiimote to the dual vibrators in an
> xbox 360 controller). In order for this to work however, we need a
> mechanism for detecting supported "haptic feedback modes" which could then
> be used on the gamepad with the WebAudio API.
>
> Here is an example of one such mechanism:
>
> var ctx = new AudioContext();
> var rumble_audio = document.getElementById("rumbleAudio");
> var rumble_audio_source = ctx.createMediaElementSource(rumble_audio)
> var modes = gamepad.getSupportedFeedbackModes();
> var feedback_node = null;
> if (typeof(modes.RUMBLE_STEREO) !== "undefined"){ // like the xbox 360
> feedback_node = gamepad.getFeedbackNode(ctx,modes.RUMBLE_STEREO);
> }else if(typeof(modes.RUMBLE_MONO) !=="undefined"){ // like some pc
> gamepads
> feedback_node = gamepad.getFeedbackNode(ctx,modes.RUMBLE_MONO);
> }else if(typeof(modes.GAMEPAD_AUDIO)){ // like the wii remote
> feedback_node = gamepad.getFeedbackNode(ctx,modes.GAMEPAD_AUDIO);
> }else{
> feedback_node = ctx.destination
> }
> rumble_audio_source.connect(feedback_node);
> rumble_audio.play();
>
> A system like this would allow both greater access to the controller's
> functionality and allow feedback to be dynamically generated or modified by
> the WebAudio API.
>
>
> I hope this suggestion helps,
> Patrick Martin
>