For this past week, I attempted to understand how we would connect to the Gear VR remote controller. We had several options to consider that each had specific tradeoffs. The controller could either be connected to the laptop and have sensor data be streamed there or we could have the controller stream data directly to the phone and eliminate the middle man (laptop). Initially from our research, we found someone that was able to successfully connect to the controller to a laptop. However, this was through the Web Bluetooth API and at the time seemed restricting since we would have to make our application on the web. For this reason, Michael decided to tackle the task of trying to connect the VR remote to a python program so that we would have access to this data from within python.
I focused on a different approach by trying to figure out how to connect the remote to the phone directly without having a laptop involved. In this case, the remote would act as the Peripheral and the phone would act as the Central instead of the laptop. We considered this approach because it would be a much more user-friendly experience to only have 2 components to use our application instead of having 3.
I initially started by looking into ways to develop for the phone and found React Native to be the most compatible and easy way to develop for either iPhone or Android. I started by looking into the best platforms to develop with React Native and found Expo.io. However, after trying to install the Bluetooth4 packages, I realized they were not compatible so instead decided to build a React Native application from scratch. After setting up the project, I tried two different Bluetooth packages: react-native-ble-manager and react-native-ble-plx. For react-native-ble-plx, I was able to successfully connect to the Gear VR but was unable to send notifications. I then tried the other package and was able to successfully connect and receive sensor data but was unable to establish a stable connection.
