Ambient Light Sensors to detect RGB colors

[lknik]

Modern sensors are capable of detecting not only luminance, but also actual RGB colors (e.g. http://ams.com/eng/Products/Light-Sensors/Color-Sensors-Proximity-Detection/TMD37821).

Might be interesting to evaluate the feasibility of including it to the spec/draft at some point. Note: it appears there are no actual devices currently supporting this.

Also, in case this ships, it should be directly subject to permissions.

[tobie]

Thanks.

As discussed, until this is exposed by underlying platforms and shipped in devices there is little point in looking at it more seriously.

I'll keep this open for now in case someone has more on this topic, else we'll revisit whenthese actually show up in devices.

[alexshalamov]

@anssiko Some Android devices as well as Windows API provide temperature in addition to 'clear channel' info. Temperature can be converted to RGB if needed. Do you think it worth experimenting with implementing support for it? RGB data can be used in e.g., accessibility applications or provided as an input for WB to Image Capture API.

[anssiko]

I'm all in for experimentation. Given good use cases and developer excitement we should consider baking it into a future spec update.

(To clarify, we're talking about measuring color temperature, not infrared radiation.)

[anssiko]

I added this issue to the Level 2 milestone.

[reillyeon]

Discussed in F2F at TPAC 2018. Related feature request to immersive-web/proposals#27. @AdaRoseCannon @kyungtae

[anssiko]

F2F minutes: https://www.w3.org/2018/10/23-dap-minutes.html#x06

[rakuco]

For the record since the immersive-web link above no longer works: the issue above was moved and is now immersive-web/lighting-estimation#1

[anssiko]

immersive-web/lighting-estimation#1 seems to pursue an XR Device API-specific ALS extension that is tied with an XRFrame. The ALS API's proposed RGB feature might still be useful for a webxr-polyfill. Cc @AdaRoseCannon to comment whether that'd be a valid use case.

Another use case described in this issue is RGB data as an input to white balance in conjunction with Image Capture API. Cc @riju who has implemented some Image Capture API enhancements and experimented with OpenCV.js to investigate.

[AdaRoseCannon]

A polyfill would definitely be a valid use case.

[anssiko]

Thank you @AdaRoseCannon. We will loop you in for review when this feature work moves forward to ensure it addresses your polyfill requirements.

[rzr]

Well, I also observed that there is no color sensor in generic sensors spec,
so I made a basic implementation of tcs34725 for IoT.js (it runs on node as well)

https://github.com/samsunginternet/color-sensor-js

It's very basic, and schema is just :

{
color: "#RrGgBb" 
}

Merging in Ambient light could makes sense, but in the case of tcs34725 It could be misleading because this sensor is active: it ships a white LED that light the material to observe.