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.

AbsoluteOrientationSensor()

Creates a new AbsoluteOrientationSensor object.

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

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

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", (error) => {
  if (event.error.name === "NotReadableError") {
    console.log("Sensor is not available.");
  }
});
sensor.start();

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.");
  }
});