HP SureView slider for brightness

[borisg912]

I have an HP EliteBook x360 1030 G4, and it, like most HP Elite, Z and some other series devices comes with an optional SureView display, that just dims the brightness even further so that people around you can't see anything (the screen is matte, anti-glare and the light is super directional, at you). The problem is that:

1. It is to my knowledge proprietary and requires special key to activate + driver to control it (afaik it is deeply integrated and you can set the brightness in Windows and in the BIOS and it is saved upon reboot/shutdown)
2. It cannot be controled by any way from UI, only by keys on keyboard (and only on the integrated, or if a detachable/2-in-1, on the HP original/compatible keyboard (not only, see notes))
3. The UI for displaying the slider itself is a janky desktop overlay that gets focused when you turn on SureView or change the brightness (and sometimes it doesn't give focus back to the app behind it) and it is modeled after the W10 metro-style brightness slider:

(I couldn't just Win+Sh+S nor PrtSc to snip these, I had to focus on the desktop and then snip them)

My question / Suggestion

Is it possible to reverse engineer the (probably keystrokes the brightness buttons send or the events they raise on the backend that make the) SureView brightness controls into the app and if so do the developers consider it as a valuable feature?

Why?

1. It would be able to cover one more "legacy" flyout
2. If possible, it would allow control of SureView without a keyboard/in tablet mode (mainly the old ones without UI, see notes)
3. It would make me, the author, hate W11 less :-)
4. It could be used as a selling feature (i doubt it)

How?

My idea was to just put a little SureView button on the side, with the same icons fron the overlays, and based on the on/off control the in-built brightness controls (Windows) or the HP SureView one with the slider/buttons. Here is a quite janky graphics of how it could look for a monitor that supports it:

...or even a flyout like the one for the Lock keys, but for the on/off triggered from the keyboard:

Notes

I found out that the Elite X2 (the Surface Pro on steroids) and some others have a touch-friendly app UI for exactly that (from):

...but:

[borisg912]

I don't know how to add a label to the issue, could someone mark it as "Enchancement", thanks in advance!

[manstheram]

@borisg912 I might try and have a go at this, but there's no way for me to test it myself as I don't have any laptop that has this feature. If I do work on it, I would need to have someone test whatever code I output quite often. I also need to see if it's simple enough to go and reverse engineer what's going on behind the scenes in that app you showed.
Also, I doubt the original maintainers of this project would allow this feature, so if I do it, it'd only be available on my fork.
But I think it'd be interesting to try code this, so would you be willing to test my code? It needs to be in a reasonable time frame though, I can't wait long weeks for you to report on whether it works or not, so I need your support.

[borisg912]

@manstheram Sure, as long as my laptop won't explode. I have enough space, i could install W10 or 11 and dualboot it to test it, and I'm confident I won't give you a week or more turnaround for results. If it's not a burden on you, I'll help you. You said you don't have (I suppose) any HP machine with that functionality, so I'll have to say that the outcome might be only for my and other laptops that have the Gen2 Sure View,as I don't know how HP has implemented the Gen1, 3, and the App-Based one, so more people with different HPs would be helpful for testing (typing this, while not knowing anyone with HP 🥀)

[manstheram]

So far, I've found only some PowerShell stuff that could be useful; however, I need something to hook into and get events, so I show the OSD popup if you enable the SureView stuff without the flyout.
Next, I'll try setting up a VM and getting the SureView UI app install and see what I can learn from there.