I'm trying to get light sensor data from an Android device for use in a Unity app

Question

Preface: There is a post made in 2016 by Ice-Blaze that covers this, his solution no longer works.

I've tried using his plugin and it does not seem to pass data or retrieve light sensor data. In that process I built out my own plugin in the form of a.aar/Android Library, for whatever the reason I can pass predefined static data from the.aar to the Unity app but not successfully retrieve light data. I believe this has to do with retrieving the light data requiring a base App-Activity and I'm not sure how to build it out for a.aar instead of a.apk.

So now I've moved on to trying to work strictly in Unity and skipping the plugin altogether. Right now this is what my Update function looks like:

Update()
 {
    InputSystem.DisableDevice(LightSensor.current);
    InputSystem.EnableDevice(LightSensor.current);

        if (LightSensor.current.enabled)
        {
            var CurrentLight = LightSensor.current.samplingFrequency;
            DisplayLight = (float)CurrentLight;
        }
        Light.value = (float)DisplayLight;
}

So here you can see that on every update I disable the device only to re-enable it. The reason I went that route is because this seems to only getting light data once on start so I thought that disabling/re-enabling might force it to consistently recheck the light value. Right now I get an initial value of 50 and no updating, it's possible that that 50 could be a default value though as I've tried under different brightness and always get the same result. Does anyone have any suggestions or fixes?

Answer 1

Here's the fix.

Update()
 {
    InputSystem.DisableDevice(LightSensor.current);
    InputSystem.EnableDevice(LightSensor.current);

        if (LightSensor.current.enabled)
        {
            var CurrentLight = LightSensor.current.lightLevel.ReadValue(); // <= change here
            DisplayLight = (float)CurrentLight;
        }
        Light.value = (float)DisplayLight;
}