A-Frame: Is there an easy way to determine which Vive controller is being used if only one turned on?

Question

I'm trying to find out if there is a way to determine which Vive controller is being used when there is only a single one. With OpenVR this information is available. I'm wondering if this is possible with A-Frame?

Answer 1

When you set the controllers, you set the handedness:

<a-entity id="leftHand" vive-controls="hand: left"></a-entity>
<a-entity id="rightHand" vive-controls="hand: right"></a-entity>

Just see which one of those hands becomes active. You could check its position/rotation are non-zero. Or in the upcoming release, you could do like:

AFRAME.registerComponent('controller-connected', {
  init: function () {
    var el = this.el;
    el.addEventListener('controllerconnected', function (evt) {
      console.log(evt.detail.component.data.hand);
      // Or... console.log(el.getAttribute(evt.detail.name).hand)
    });
  } 
});

<a-entity controller-connected id="leftHand" vive-controls="hand: left"></a-entity>
<a-entity controller-connected id="rightHand" vive-controls="hand: right"></a-entity>

A-Frame currently uses just the index of the Gamepad array to determine left/right. To manually check which controller is connected, you can call the Gamepad API:

navigator.getGamepads();