On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 12:10:41PM -0500, Felipe Balbi wrote: > Hi, > > On Mon, 30 Aug 2010 09:28:56 -0700, Dmitry Torokhov > <dmitry.torokhov@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> When we tried to push N900's accelerometer driver as an > >> input device you commented you didn't want sensors such > >> as accelerometers, magnetometers, proximity, etc on the > >> input layer because "they are not user input", although > >> I didn't fully agree with you, we had to modify the drivers > >> and, I believe, one of them is sitting in staging under > >> the industrial i/o subsystem. > >> > >> Are you now accepting sensor drivers on the input layer ? > >> that will make our life a lot easier but we need some > >> definition to avoid having to re-work drivers when we > >> want to push them to mainline. > >> > > > > I got persuaded that 3-axis accelerometers are most often indended to be > > used as input devices so I decided I should take these in (adxl134x is > > there). I still think that sensor devices in general are better suited > > to IIO subsystem and I hope it will get out of staging soon. > > > > Once it is out of staging we may think about creating a IIO-to-input > > bridge (copuld be either in kernel or a userspace solution based on > > uinput) to route sensors that are indeed used as HIDs. > > > > Hope this makes sense. > > It kinda does, but such sensors will be more and more used as > input devices, specially for gaming on mobile devices. > > For example a proximity sensor might be used as the trigger > button on a first person shooting game; accelerometers will > be used to walk through the map and a magnetometer might be > used to look behind you and a gyroscope to turn around your > own axis. > > In the end, the user is the one moving the device around and > generating such events, so why not avoiding yet another > subsystem if we will have to resort to solutions such as > iio-to-input bridge, which smells like a hackish solution > to get input events from sensors anyway. > > I really hope I could convince you that, on mobile at least, > sensors will be mostly used as HID devices and will give > app developers new ways for them to allow users to interact > with their app. > > Take a look at how a gyroscope is used on iphone, for > instance [1]. > > [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORcu-c-qnjg > My response to this - are gyroscopes will _only_ be used to turn around in a game? Are proximity sensor is _only_ usable as a trigger in FPS? Won't we ever see such chips controlling technological processes? I do hope that answerrs are no, no and yes. -- Dmitry -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-input" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
