I am attempting to use the data received from DeviceOrientationEvents to animate (rotate) a camera in three.js using three's DeviceOrientationControls. The controls are updated upon every animation frame, and everything works as I would expect. However, if I begin to scroll, then no DeviceOrientationEvent is fired again until the inertia from the scrolling is complete.
I have confirmed that these events are not fired (or at least not dispatched) during the scroll by logging to the console from within the DeviceOrientationEvent handler. I can see the events fired regularly up until the moment I begin to scroll, then stop, and then resume firing from the moment the inertia from the scroll is complete.
Manually stopping the inertia mid-scroll (by touching the screen) also causes the deviceorientation events to resume.
I have disabled all other scroll event handlers in my script. I have made all touch event handlers passive, have tried making them non-passive as well, and have also tried disabling all touch event handlers in my script altogether.
I am fairly sure by this point that this may be a function of how the processing of the scroll thread (which operates separately to the main thread) and the processing of IMU data are scheduled/queued in the browser, so that there may be no good solution, but I'm asking here in case there is something I've overlooked in my own troubleshooting. This does not appear to be an issue with three.js or the DeviceOrientationControls in three.js, but I've tagged this as three.js just in case anybody has ever come across this problem when attempting something similar.
My unique case for having DeviceOrientationControls enabled while scrolling is that scroll drives the animation of a "camera rig" (of empty objects whose rotation and position are animated), while moving the phone around rotates the camera itself. (It's a bit like being able to turn your head to look around while moving in a railcar.)
My testing has been on an IPhone 11 Pro, with iOS 13.5.1, in Chrome iOS 84, and Safari. I have not tested on Android.
iOS has slowed down repetitive JavaScript functionality during scroll for many years now. This is to conserve battery consumption, since it has to re-render the page lots of times while scrolling, so it halts other secondary commands until scrolling is complete. See here for more.
You could create your own custom scrolling functionality without actually scrolling down an HTML page by capturing vertical swipe gestures via 'touchstart' and 'touchmove'. Or you could use a library like Hammer.js to help you.