gamepad buttons axes test
This page polls your controller every frame and shows the state of every button and axis in the standard mapping. Controller polling runs entirely on your own device; no button or axis state ever leaves your browser toward a server.
Index 0 is fixed under the standard mapping, so this same test works identically on an Xbox, PlayStation or generic compatible controller, without needing to identify the peripheral brand.
Even at rest the axes rarely hit exactly 0, which is exactly why a dead zone is applied before treating the stick as truly idle.
Unlike digital buttons, the analog trigger reports a value between 0 and 1 proportional to how deep it is pressed, alongside the pressed boolean, which only flags whether it crossed the minimum threshold.
Several browsers only expose the gamepad after a physical interaction with it (pressing a button or moving a stick). This is a privacy protection, press any button to trigger detection.
Because the gamepadconnected event usually requires an initial interaction on the hardware before the browser exposes the device to the page, a protection against sites silently detecting which peripherals are plugged in without any action from the person.
Because the stick's internal potentiometer carries electrical noise and mechanical play that prevent a perfectly centered reading; that is why games ignore any axis value below a configured dead zone, typically between 0.1 and 0.15, before moving the character.
Only when mapping is "standard": in that case index 0 is always the bottom button of the right cluster, regardless of brand, but a controller with an empty mapping string may order its buttons differently, so the index alone will not always match the printed label.
Because the Gamepad API represents each axis as a position relative to the center of the stick's travel, where 0 is the exact center, -1 is the furthest left or up, and 1 is the furthest right or down, a symmetric range that is easier to use in direction calculations.
Controller signals are read locally and are not sent to the server.