[javascript] How to access accelerometer/gyroscope data from Javascript?

The way to do this in 2019+ is to use DeviceOrientation API. This works in most modern browsers on desktop and mobile.

window.addEventListener("deviceorientation", handleOrientation, true);

After registering your event listener (in this case, a JavaScript function called handleOrientation()), your listener function periodically gets called with updated orientation data.

The orientation event contains four values:

  • DeviceOrientationEvent.absolute
  • DeviceOrientationEvent.alpha
  • DeviceOrientationEvent.beta
  • DeviceOrientationEvent.gamma

The event handler function can look something like this:

function handleOrientation(event) {
  var absolute = event.absolute;
  var alpha    = event.alpha;
  var beta     = event.beta;
  var gamma    = event.gamma;
  // Do stuff with the new orientation data
}