AbsoluteOrientationSensor

Limited availability

This feature is not Baseline because it does not work in some of the most widely-used browsers.

Secure context: This feature is available only in secure contexts (HTTPS), in some or all supporting browsers.

The AbsoluteOrientationSensor interface of the Sensor APIs describes the device's physical orientation in relation to the Earth's reference coordinate system.

To use this sensor, the user must grant permission to the 'accelerometer', 'gyroscope', and 'magnetometer' device sensors through the Permissions API.

This feature may be blocked by a Permissions Policy set on your server.

Constructor

AbsoluteOrientationSensor(): Creates a new AbsoluteOrientationSensor object.

Instance properties

No specific properties; inherits properties from its ancestors OrientationSensor and Sensor.

Instance methods

No specific methods; inherits methods from its ancestors OrientationSensor and Sensor.

Events

No specific events; inherits methods from its ancestor, Sensor.

The following example, which is loosely based on Intel's Orientation Phone demo, instantiates an AbsoluteOrientationSensor with a frequency of 60 times a second. On each reading it uses OrientationSensor.quaternion to rotate a visual model of a phone.

const options = { frequency: 60, referenceFrame: "device" };
const sensor = new AbsoluteOrientationSensor(options);

sensor.addEventListener("reading", () => {
  // model is a Three.js object instantiated elsewhere.
  model.quaternion.fromArray(sensor.quaternion).inverse();
});
sensor.addEventListener("error", (event) => {
  if (event.error.name === "NotReadableError") {
    console.log("Sensor is not available.");
  }
});
sensor.start();

Permissions Example

Using orientation sensors requires requesting permissions for multiple device sensors. Because the Permissions interface uses promises, a good way to request permissions is to use Promise.all.

const sensor = new AbsoluteOrientationSensor();
Promise.all([
  navigator.permissions.query({ name: "accelerometer" }),
  navigator.permissions.query({ name: "magnetometer" }),
  navigator.permissions.query({ name: "gyroscope" }),
]).then((results) => {
  if (results.every((result) => result.state === "granted")) {
    sensor.start();
    // …
  } else {
    console.log("No permissions to use AbsoluteOrientationSensor.");
  }
});

Specifications

Specification
Orientation Sensor # absoluteorientationsensor-interface

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser