Use your iPhone/iPad as a controller for an HTML5 browser game. (opens in new tab)

iOS only? Meh. It really is true: iOS is the new MSIE.

Somewhere down the road iOS-only code will not be accepted, and then we have tons of code already deployed which will never work on anything else, unless Apple's non-standard JS and webkit extensions are accounted for in other browsers.

This is hopeless and pathetic. And HN will love it.

Not working with my iPhone 4. Paired successfully with the game and Safari was showing the accelerometer values(which changed as I moved the phone) but my ship wouldn't move no matter what I did.

We're doing the same thing at Brass Monkey, raised our seed round and are trucking along with lots of features. Hope you guys check us out to. Checkout our website and video demo. http://playbrassmonkey.com/

This is a pretty similar idea to what the guys at Clik are doing.

http://demos.clikthis.com/ethershock/

I think they have an Android/iPhone companion app that works for these types of web apps.

I worked on a project[0] very similar to this just recently. It's definitely not as nice as this, but it's got the added advantage of being able to use javascript events to-spec, and the only lines in your game code are these:

    iPhone = new Controller();
    iPhone.on('touchstart', function(event) { /*...*/ }

That's the entire API ;)

I'm in two minds over the use of QR codes here. I had two solutions to the problem of pairing browsers: as I do it now, I ask for a pairing code. Another, more hacky (but possibly nicer) solution is to assume that if a controller and a parent browser have the same external IP, you can assume that they want to pair up.

Anyway, kudos to the developers - it's a really cool idea, I think. If my code can help out at all, please go right ahead :) (also sorry for hijacking your thread)

[0] https://github.com/CarlQLange/Controller.js

Link on how the demo is created is here http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2012/using-an-ios-device-to-co...

I built a slideshow control system for a class project using nearly the same approach. A user uploads a slideshow or authors it online and connects a phone/device via a QR Code or URL to control the presentation. The controller uses websockets to communicate with a nodejs server for events like previous/next, a touch-screen based laser pointer, and presenter notes. I was amazed how responsive the touch movements translated to moving a dot on the screen through a remote node server.

We didn't use any accelerometer events, but touch events worked seamlessly on iOS and Android.

I had worked on a similar weekend project where you control an actual toy car with the iPad. (I'll probably blog about it soon)

I solved the latency problem by using websockets. I know, it's not a widely used standard but was good enough for a weekend project.

I have been working on this similar idea for more than a year now. Really glad seeing more people are interested in this. Ping me if you are interested in chatting a little more about the project.

Awesome. loved it!