I need to handle 3 types of gestures in my app: points, lines and circles.
Circles and lines are vectored (may be drawn in different directions, like in windows 8 picture password).
Now I'm looking for a better way for it - read about GestureOverlayView, but, how I understood, those gestures should be given initially, and my lines will be at different angles, and circles at different diameters.
Is there any easy way to do it, or better to use onTouchEvent and detect gestures mathematically?
When you said you "need to handle 3 types of gestures", what exactly do you mean by 'handle', ie. what do you need to do with the gestures? Do you mean that you need to determine if a particular gesture is a point, line or circle?
If you want to analyse a gesture, as it is being drawn or after it is drawn, you could create a Path object and update it in each onTouchEvent. Then you would do your mathematical calculations with the points along that Path. http://developer.android.com/reference/android/graphics/Path.html
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im new to this android things. And i have to develop an application that can help an autism to learn numbers. I have a few ideas and I've been trying to learn and implement the code. But it's failed. The question is how can i apply the motion code or sprite to draw a numbers or letter? For example like this, i wanna make the penguin move through the line and draw a number nine.
There is example from mybringback.com which is the image move to draw a rectangle. How can i implement it to draw a number? Im sorry if i asking too much, i just trying to get some ideas.
I think that you should first build an utility program, in order to create the "path vector".
What I mean by path vector is simply a vector of Points (where a point has x value, and y value). And your utility should let you draw whatever you want, with a simple pen. You should draw on surface and store points when mouse is down, and ignore points when mouse is up.
Then, in the main program, you will just have to read at the path of your number/letter.
I've tried to implement something like this for the Sugar OLPC platform, without serializing path into files : I was able to draw, and to view the animation. And I used the process I've just described you.
Hope it can help you.
P.S : I used the word mouse, but you guessed that I talk about finger ...
There are various ways to achieve animation effects. One approach that is quite versatile involves creating a custom View or SurfaceView in which you Override the onDraw method. Various tutorials can be found on this; the official Android discussion of it is here:
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/graphics/2d-graphics.html#on-view
Your implementation will look something like this:
// Find elapsed time since previous draw
// Compute new position of drawable/bitmap along figure
// Draw bitmap in appropriate location
// Add line to buffer containing segments of curve drawn so far
// Render all segments in curve buffer
// Take some action to call for the rendering of the next frame (this may be done in another thread)
Obviously a simplification. For a very simplistic tutorial, see here:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/software-engineer/bouncing-a-ball-on-androids-canvas/1733/
Note that different implementations of this technique will require different levels of involvement by you; for example, if you use a SurfaceView, you are in charge of calling the onDraw method, whereas subclassing the normal View lets you leave Android in charge of redrawing (at the expense of limiting your ability to draw on a different thread). In this respect, Google remains your friend =]
I'd like to create a custom map. It should be or look like one picture, but according to the part of which the user clicks, it should move the user to a different location (i.e. start a different activity). I've seen it done in several games but I don't know how to do it myself.
The part of the picture should have non-geometrical borders (obviously it would be easily done with many square images). Sadly, I don't even know what term describes what I want to do so I wasn't able to find any helpful tutorials or discussed topics.
Example:
Picture: http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff40/iathen/mapEx.png
If the user touches the purple slide, (s)he should be leaded to activity_1
If the user touches the blue slide, (s)he should be leaded to activity_2
If the user touches the green slide, (s)he should be leaded to activity_3
In my experience there are 2 main (most used) ways to achieve this.
The first (my favorite):
Get the data from a PNG
You should write multiple layers to a canvas. These layers constitute your "zones" (blue, green, purple in the image). To obtain the data of these areas, you get it from PNGs (with transparencies off course) to write the canvas with whatever you want. You must store the values where there can be a tap from the user (non-transparent areas). Notice that this values can be scaled up/down depending on the map size, screen resolution, map dimensions, etc.
Once you've written the layers to the canvas you should check for a match of the user tap and the stored areas you have. You should take into consideration here the order in which the user tap is processed in your code. For instance, in your image, the purple layer is on top so it must be processed first, the blue as second, and the green as the last one. This way you can have an "island" inside a bigger area.
The second way:
Generate the boundaries programmaticaly
I think this solution is self-explanatory. The only I've faced with this variant is that when the surfaces boundaries get messy, it's really complicated to generate the proper equations.
EDIT:
Using the first approach you can employ multiple PNGs to load data or use a single PNG with data coded into the bytes (i.e. RGB values). It's up to you to decide which one to implement.
Hope it helps!
Since a touchscreen itself isn't very accurate, your collision detection for the buttons doesn't need to be either. It would be a waste of time to try to make a complicated collision detection algorithm to detect a touch within those weird shapes.
Since you are making a game, I assume you know how to handle custom touch events, as well as canvas (at least). There are many ways to do what you want, but in the specific example image you linked is kind of a special case.
You could create a giant bounding circle around the three blobs, and then check if the user touched within the bounds of the circle (ie check if the distance from the touch to the center of the circle is less than or equal to the radius). Once you determine that it is, you could check which section of the circle it falls into by splitting it up into 3 equal sections. Requires some math, but shouldn't be that complicated.
It wouldn't be a perfect solution, but it should be good enough. Although, you might have to change the buttons a little so they aren't so stretched out horizontally, otherwise a bounding circle wouldn't be ideal.
Personally, in my games I always have "nodes" that represent the visual elements of the game, such as buttons. Instead of using a large image like you are doing, I would create separate images for each button, and then check their collisions with touch events independently. That way I could have each button check with their own individual bounding circles, or, if absolutely necessary, I could even have custom algorithms for each individual button.
These aren't perfect solutions. If you do want a pixel-perfect solution, you'll need to implement some polygon collision detection algorithms
One thing to consider is screen size and ratio. The only constants you should use are for percentages.
I have received requirement like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MYQicokwmY&feature=plcp I am reviewing this requirement.As per requirement we have to build touch detection like in video link for Android enabled Tablets.
In that video toys (toys with circular, star or rectangle shape) uses Conductive Silicone Sensors with that they are detecting touch on screen & deciding shape of external world object like triangle,circle or a star & further processing the shape.
I have to use same touch detection for android tablets.Can anybody help me to find the way to implement this on Android platform ? Is there any API or framework to implement it?
If you see the video around 1:13, they show what I am guessing are some prototypes, the circle has three points, the hexagon too...
My best guess is that the biggest part of the object is non-conductive and only has a few points that are conductive and would actually register as touch points on the screen. The key is that each of them will be different enough that you would be able to recognize them no matter what the orientation is, what the position (and depending on your requirements whether you have several of those objects at the same time on the screen).
You can also play with the area of each conductive points so in your code, you will get the touch information, you can get different pressure values from the MotionEvent
Now how you place the conductive points and how many on each shape is completely up to you and would really depend on what your requirements are (recognizing arbitrary shape is not an option...)
Most touch screens would reject the touch if the area is too large (that's palm rejection), so I don't think there are much other ways to do this...
Is it possible to detect every pixel being touched? More specifically, when the user touches the screen, is it possible to track all the x-y coordinates of the cluster of points touched by the user? How can I tell the difference between when users are drawing with their thumb and when they are drawing with the tip of a finger? I would like to reflect the brush difference depending on how users touch the screen, and would also like to track x-y coordinates of all the pixels being touched over time. Thanks so much in advance for any help.
This would be very tricky primarily because every android phone is going to behave differently. There are some touch screen devices that are very, very sensitive and some that are basically "dull" by comparison.
It also sounds more like you are wanting to track pressure - how hard is the user pushing on the screen - which is actually supported on android devices.
I think some of your answer may be found by monitoring all of the touch events - in practice, most applications ignore a great number of events or perform some kind of "smoothing" of the events since there is literally a deluge of touch events when the user is manipulating the screen. Doing this may negatively impact your applications performance though.
I would recommend that you look into pressure sensitivity and calculate a circular region around the primary touch point based on pressure, then build your brush around that.
Another idea would be to incorporate more of a gesture approach to what you are trying to do - for example, visualize touching the screen with the tip of two fingers together (index and middle) and rolling the middle finger around the index finger or simply moving the middle finger up and down in relation to the index finger. Both fingers would be moved together for painting. This could be used to manipulate drawing angle on the fly or perhaps even toggle between a set of pre-selected brushes or could change brush size on the fly as you are painting.
Some of the above ideas I would love to see implemented - let me know when you have your app ready.
Good luck!
Rodney
If you have a listener on your image it will respond that there was a touch within that bounding box, basically.
So, to get what you want, you could, but, I would never do this, create a box around every pixel, or small group of pixels, and listen for a touch.
Wherever you get a touch, it may fire off an event, then you can react accordingly.
I can't think of any other solution that will give you each pixel that a person touched, at one time.
You may want to read up on multitouch though, as there are some suggestions in here that my help you:
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/06/making-sense-of-multitouch.html
If you're looking for a way to get your content view as a View after Activity#setContentView(int), then you can set an id on the outer-most element of your layout:
android:id="#+id/entire_view" and reference it in your onCreate() method after setContentView:
View view = getViewById(R.id.entire_view);
view.setOnTouchListener( ... );
What would be the best way to compare a gesture made on an Android device's screen with a stored gesture? For example, if in my application, I want it so that if I draw a triangle with my finger, the screen will turn blue, and if I draw a circle, the screen will turn red, how could that be done? The only thing I have been able to think of so far is to somehow generate an image file and then compare that to an image of a triangle or circle and check for similarities. But that wouldn't really account for different sized shapes or offset ones. Any ideas on how this could be implemented? Thanks!
There is no need to compare/match the shape of a gesture with an image. The better way is to mathematically guess which one of the recognized shapes did the user draw. http://developer.android.com/resources/articles/gestures.html provides a great reference for implementing gestures.
HTH,
Akshay