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Intro to the orientation API

The Orientation API

Introduction

This section covers the HTML5 orientation API: a way to use angle measures provided by accelerometers from mobile devices or laptops such as MacBooks.

Beware: all examples must be run on a device with an orientation sensor and/or with an accelerometer. Furthermore, Chrome/Safari and Mozilla support this API, but Opera mobile doesn’t (yet) at the time of writing. 

If it provides a “mobile device emulation mode”, you can use the devtools of a desktop browser to fake the orientation values  (see the support table below, the columns for desktop versions of browsers are about the support for this emulation mode).

Here is a table that shows support for this API as of December 2018:

Orientation API support

For an up to date version of this table: http://caniuse.com/#feat=deviceorientation

Notice that all major browsers support the API in their mobile version.

External resources:

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