openglES - give a curved effect to a wall of pictures - android

I am starting with openglES (on android).
I have in my app a wall of pictures. I have already made a simple tiled wall where I can browse with translations and zooms, and implemented a simple picking system.
Now I would like to give this wall a curved effect like we can see often (like in safari, see my images)
Do you think i can do it by applying simples (naive..) Y-rotations and Z-translations on each tile?
My first exemple seems to do that wheras my second looks more complicated.
Can you give me some ideas or a solution if you already did it for one of your project??
Exemple 1 : motorola xoom
Exemple 2 : safari top sites

Just write it out on paper. Start with a circle of whatever radius you want your pictures laid out in, then figure out the math to calculate a position along that circle for each object and translate/rotate each image/polygon to it's correct location. Then you could do the rest in one of two ways, you could have a rotation variable that rotates all your images around the vertical axis, or you could rotate your camera to look at a different spot on your picture wall. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could apply your images to curved surfaces so that rather than being a bunch of flat polygons, you could actually be looking at the curved images.

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Android game board with irregular board spaces

I'm creating an Android board game with several differently shaped board spaces (like Risk).
I want to be sure that my board appears correct and that OnTouchListeners stay in place on the GUI regardless of screen size/resolution.
Possible solutions I have thought of and their problems:
Create a single image for the board and assign OnTouchListeners based upon pixel geometry. Problem: If the user's display is a different resolution, my Listener might not be under the same pixels as my image (right?)
Create several ImageButtons and arrange them together. Problem: the ImageButtons might get rearranged based upon the display and I would end up with overlapping spaces or gaps.
Use Android custom drawing. If I do this, how would I link my Listeners to my Canvas and be sure that they are synced?
Basic question:
How to be sure that listeners sync with graphics in a GUI that uses irregular geometry?
I worked on an app with irregular touch areas so I can give you guidance on one way to achieve this.
Start with a single image for your entire board. This image is going to have a certain ("intrinsic") width and height regardless of any device resolutions.
Now here comes the tedious part. You (or maybe your graphic designer) will need to plot out coordinates of an irregular polygon for each touch area. These will be constants to your application.
When you are displaying your board, if you are zooming and panning on the image, you want to keep track of the transform matrix for the display. When the user touches the screen, you will get x,y coordinates from OnTouchListener and for those to be useful, you will have to "de-transform" the x,y to normalize it against the intrinsic dimensions of the board and your polygons.
We rolled our own hit-testing logic using an algorithm from http://alienryderflex.com/polygon/, but you can also try this: Create a Path out of your polygon coordinates (using moveTo(), lineTo(), and close()), then assign the Path to a Region using Region.setPath(). Once you have that, supposedly you should be able to hit-test using Region.contains(x,y), but I've never tried it so I can't guarantee that's going to work.

Scrolling home screen in LibGdx

I am using LibGdx to develop a game. For Now I am not using scene2D. I am struck up in increasing the levels of the game as I do not have the scrolling screen.
I like to design a a scrolling screen as it is in many games which are level based (for ref, lets say Candy crush). Could you please point me a example on how to have such a scrolling screen to show a bigger area where I can show many levels.
Thanks is Advance !
Using the Scene2D function is not necessary for this and is more for GUI implementation and different screens. The Scroll pane really shines when creating reading content that does not fit your phone. I do advice to start learning Scene2D to create MenuScreens and UI though.
What Candy Crush "simply" does is having multiple backgrounds that are placed next to each other and tile seamlessly. They use buttons in the correct place for levels. By dragging a finger across the screen the camera will move in that direction. For the movement from one level to the next there is probably something like a spline in play.
It is important only to draw the background tiles and buttons that are actually visible on the screen if you have many. Since these have fixed positions and you know your camera area and position you can calculate what to draw and what not. Just drawing everything each frame is likely to slow down your fps.
You can do a search on:
Tilemaps, for you backgrounds but you probably want them in just one direction so a simple 1D array would suffice.
Dragging, to move your camera. Here I gave a basic explanations on how I do it.
Splines, are a bit tougher and you do not really need them. They could be used to animate or move something along a curve.
Thats all, expecting you know how to create something like a button (click a sprite).

how to attach overlay to detected object using android and OpenCV

I'm writing an android app using OpenCV for my masters that will be something like a game. The main goal is to a detect a car in selected area. The "prize" will be triggered randomly while detecting cars. When the user will hit the proper car I want to display a 3D object overlay on the screen and attach it to the middle of the car and keep it there so when the user will change the angle of his view on the car, the object will also be seen from diffrent angle.
at the moment I have EVERYTHING beside attaching the object. I've created detection, I'm drawing the 3D overlay, I've created functions that allow me to rotate the camera etc. BUT I do not have any clue how can I attach the overlay to the specific point. Cause I don't have this I have no point to recalculate the renderer to change the overlay perspective.
Please, I really need some help, even a small idea will be fine:
How can I attach the overlay to the specific in real world
(Sorry, I couldn't comment. Need at least 50 points to do that ... :P )
I assume your image of the car is coming from a camera feed and you are drawing 3d car in opengl. If so, then you can try this:
You set the pixel format of the opengl layer as RGBA_8888, so that you can set the background of the opengl camera as a transparent color.
You take a relative layout as layout of your activity.
first you add the opencv camera layout to it as full height and width.
then you add opengl layer as full height and width.
you get the position of the real car from opencv layer as pixel value or something you did.
then scale it to your opengl parameters so that you can draw it on the right spot.
it worked for me. hope it works for you too.

How to project a picture onto a bubble surface programmatically

I want to implement an effect that, showing a picture on a bubble surface with the picture looks like surrounding the bubble surface. But I don't know how to do this kind of things...
I am doing it in Android platform, should I use OpenGL ES for this ? Or just some 2D transformation can achieve this effect ?
One more question is, I want to create many interesting graphics effects like the PhotoShop's various filter, is there any books/articles I can refer for this kind of things ? Is this kind of work belongs to the "Digital Image Processing" field or some other computer graphics related fields ?
Or just some 2D transformation
This effect is a nonlinear transformation, so doing through the 2D (linear) transformations being available will not work. You can do it using OpenGL by numerous ways. I'm currently thinking about some easy to understand way to convey, what you need to do. Basically you need to implement some kind of refraction or nonlinear radial warp.
Say p is the center of your bubble (in 2D), and r the position relative to p, then the undistorted picture is given by r+p. Now you want to distort it toward the edges. A parabolic distortion comes to mid, i.e. instead of r+p you'd show the pixel r + (|p|^2)*p/|p|

How do I build a graphical needle gauge UI widget in Android?

I need a graphical needle gauge (like a speedometer etc) for my app but such a UI widget is not part of the SDK so I probably have to create it myself.
My idea is to have the background with the tickmarks and coloured fields (green, yellow, red) as one bitmap and the needle as another bitmap drawn on top of the background, but rotated in the appropriate angle.
In my book, Professional Android 2 Application Development, there is a somewhat similar example with a compass rose, although that one is drawn using line graphics, not pre-fabricated images like I will have to use to get the desired look.
However, in the compass example the whole canvas is rotated before drawing the tick marks. I cannot use this approach as it will also rotate the gauge background. So I need to somehow rotate the needle image (which should be transparent) before superimposing it. But I don't know how to do accomplish this.
Can anyone lead me in the right direction on how to proceed with the needle gauge? Also, if there is a better way to build the meter than sketched above, please let me know.
You can divide your guage into different layers. One for background, one for tick marks. Layer for tick marks can be rotated to draw marks and when turned back and combined with 'background' layer.
You can see the following example with layer technique described above: http://mindtherobot.com/blog/534/android-ui-making-an-analog-rotary-knob/
P.S. This is not my blog, i've just found this technique there.

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