Rumble support with Gamepads?

Question

I have read through both the MDN Gamepad API page and the W3C Gamepad API page, and I have found nothing about any rumble features with Gamepads. I found one page that referenced rumble support in FireFox with an android phone, but only had one comment that talked about gamepad support. That comment has 2 links: a dead blog, and a Bugzilla thread. The Bugzilla thread never ended up saying that this feature was added. I did find one more page that directly referenced the gamepad rumble control, but it was under the "The Future" section of the post.

Another issue with all these links I gave, is that they are all from between 2010-2013, nothing newer.

Is there a rumble feature for gamepads possible in the current state of web browsers? And is there a company that has directly said that they are working on it?

Answer 1

There’s the Vibration API (see also Editor’s Draft, MDN). That has support in Firefox and Chrome. It is more generally designed for phone vibration than gamepad haptics though, and only supports a single target.

I imagine that what you’re requesting would be better served by being specified as part of a future iteration of the Gamepad API. This is being written on Github, and there’s an open issue to get it in. Maybe contributing your use cases might help advance its addition?