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Hasn’t been mentioned before: try this on a phone. It uses the gyroscope for control and it quickly becomes second nature to balance/guide the square around the
by juretriglav 8y ago
Hasn’t been mentioned before: try this on a phone. It uses the gyroscope for control and it quickly becomes second nature to balance/guide the square around the screen. Also a very nice and rewarding discovery process, as it starts out with squares speeding by, until you realize it’s the tilt of your phone that is causing it. Congrats, super fun!
- ronilan 8y agoIndeed. This is awosome on mobile!
- scarejunba 8y agoHaha, took me a while to figure out that it doesn’t handle different screen rotations but once I did it’s quite neat how intuitive it is.
- nkrisc 8y agoOh that's funny. I thought the block was always supposed to be falling because of the angle I hold my phone at.
- KenanSulayman 8y agoThe APIs powering this are in the process of being heavily restricted or removed altogether -- if you think games like this should exist, you should voice your concern here: https://github.com/w3c/deviceorientation/issues/57 https://github.com/w3c/deviceorientation/issues/57.
- snazz 8y agoIt looks to me that they’re just adding a permission for gyro access instead of turning it off altogether. Did I misread it?
- KenanSulayman 8y agohttps://github.com/w3c/deviceorientation/issues/57#issuecomment-451985213 https://github.com/w3c/deviceorientation/issues/57#issuecomm...
- teraflop 8y agoThat comment does not say the APIs are in the process of being removed. And asking people to comment on the issue to say that they shouldn't be removed would not be helping the discussion, because that point has already been made in the thread by at least three people that I count.
- beatgammit 8y agoSince it's GitHub, just add a thumbs up or whatever to the comment in question, don't just add me too comments. That's the way I've seen voting work best in GitHub.
- zchrykng 8y agoIf the app doesn't want to ask permission before gathering my data, they can pound sand.
- doodpants 8y agoIt seems to me that gyroscope data is merely input, rather than personal data. In other words, I'm not sure asking permission before accessing gyroscope data makes any more sense than asking permission before accepting touch screen input. Or for desktop applications, asking permission before accepting keyboard/mouse input.
- saagarjha 8y agoCollecting gyroscope data is quite passive, though. It's easy to forget that an app/website has access to this.
- beatgammit 8y agoAnd it's also more concerning from a privacy perspective since it's the position of something outside of the app (the phone) instead of inside of the app. Mouse coordinates work this way (only get cursor updates within your browser tab content area), so it makes sense to require permission from the user before accessing it.
- dom96 8y agoIndeed. Very cool concept. I think it needs some sort of prompt about the tilting. Also the mechanism might need some calibration, I tested it with my SO and the tilting was too sensitive for her to control it accurately.
- daliusd 8y agoNote: mobile Chrome but not Firefox.
- colordrops 8y agoKind of disturbing that Chrome just provides gyroscope data without any notification to the user.
- manfredo 8y agoWhat would one feasibly do with this data? I guess an app could tell if someone is holding their phone in their had, and maybe put together a pedometer bases on gyroscope input. Maybe a concern if a app has access to gyro input over a period of days. But as long as it's only for actively open apps and web pages I don't really see much harm.
- saagarjha 8y agoThe gyroscope is a datapoint that can be used for fingerprinting. Plus it gives quite a bit of information about you: whether you are lying down, sitting, walking, etc.
- tokyodude 8y agodoesn't this assume the user is walking around with the page open, the front tab, and the phone unlocked for a reasonably long period? which websites do I spend enough time on for that to be true? I don't generally walk and read
- colordrops 8y agoBrowsers now have service workers that run in the background even when the browser UI isn't loaded.
- saagarjha 8y ago> I don't generally walk and read That's how I spend 10-ish% of my time on Hacker News
- JeremyBanks 8y agoWith sufficiently high-frequency gyroscope data, it is possible to infer what a user types in with moderate precision. In some cases, it has even been shown to be possible to recover coarse audio data from the surrounding environment. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=421691 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=421691 Browsers have added rate limiting to mitigate this threat. (Prior to that, my former team in Google Ads added our own rate limiting to the gyroscope API we provided for ads.) The risk now seems pretty minor, but I wouldn't be shocked if someone clever still managed to find some way to abuse it.
- crystalmace 8y agoOr your Macbook Pro if it originally came with an HDD. Apparently the device orientation API can utilize the triaxial accelerometer that Apple used for drop detection. Really neat experience tilting my laptop around like a mad man.
- saagarjha 8y agoThat's…quite surprising. It's a cool feature, but I'm afraid that it's just another surface that can will be used for browser fingerprinting.
- dddddaviddddd 8y agoSurely it asks explicitly for permission to use the sensor?
- pedrocx486 8y agoChrome does not, no.
- crsv 8y agoMobile safari on an iPhone XR just worked.
- JCharante 8y agoDo MacBooks that shipped with an SSD not have the accelerometer?
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoMy 2012 Macbook Air had an accelerometer and of course shipped with an SSD. No idea if it's in the newer Airs, or why it's there.
- geofft 8y agoMy MacBook with an SSD (12", 2017) does not have an accelerometer as far as either my web browser or `pmset -g` can tell.
- anonytrary 8y agoGood call. I'm impressed they implemented it that way. It's hard at first, but once I got used to the sensitivity, I found the mobile version of this game a lot easier to use than the desktop one.
- komali2 8y agoWooooah, that's why it was speeding around without any input from me! My laptop has a gyro in it as well that I forgot about!
- beatgammit 8y agoYeah, that was super cool. I'm a little annoyed that you can't lose (red block goes away under 10 points), but it was way more fun on my phone. In fact, I didn't realize that the gyro worked in both dimensions! I thought it was just a fast downward fall and it was actually hard to hit the red block since it kept moving. Then I found out you could lay the phone flat and slow the green block down and it was way more fun! I like the concept and could see a more complete game making a ton of sense.
- alphakappa 8y agoNitpick: It's not just the gyroscope. DeviceOrientation (at least on the iPhone) uses blends both the accelerometer and gyroscope (and if specified, the compass too)
- andyidsinga 8y agoholy crap - works on my hp spectre 360 too! - i'm doubly impressed.