motion sensor gestures

It's been quite a bit of time since I blogged about anything. No longer able to post to the official Qt Labs blog, so I will post here, and maybe it will get picked up to a wider audience.

It's been about 60 days since my last day at the Nokia office In Brisbane, Australia. My days are now full of house duties, kids, recording music, and looking for appropriate workage.

Blatant self promotion

I have been trying to keep my chops up, taking a short contract doing some desktopy work with Qt. But also keeping up with the Mer and Nemo projects.

We have been working on refactoring the Qt 5 QSensor qml API, removing the old qt-mobility stuff and merging the two imports.

As well, I will, in the near future be adding a QFreeFall sensor that detects when a device is freefalling, and a Wii controller sensor plugin to drive the normal motion QSensors and well as some of the QSensorGestures.

I have done the easily possible, and back ported QSensorGesture and friends to Qt 4, so projects such as Mer/Nemo/Jolla, as well as the Blackberry 10 projects could use some cool sensor gestures API.

When most people think of gesture recognition, they think of the touch sensor. Within Qt, this would be the QGesture classes. They also think about using the image sensor to decipher gestures through a computer vision API such as openCV.
and although I would like to extend QSensorGesture to include the openCV and touch sensors techniques, this is really about existing device motion gestures.

Things such as the obvious gesture of 'shake' - when you shake your phone/tablet, your audio playlist gets randomized. But it can be extended to other gestures as well.

QSensors include the qtsensors gesture recognition plugin, that includes such gestures as whip, shake, pickup, twist, cover, hover, turnover and slam.

http://doc-snapshot.qt-project.org/5.0/sensorgesture-plugins-topics.html#recognizer-plugins

The above url shows about how to perform these gestures.

These are simple ad-hock gesture recognizers, and do not verge into the more robust and technically challenging HMM realm of recognizers.


Nor is it currently possible for a user to create their own gestures and use them. I'd planned on doing this at my day job, but someone thought it better I needed to take my own time doing them. These are still on my todo list.

Of course, the backport isn't in the official Qt Mobility repo until becomes a part of the qt-project, but I believe that is only a matter of time and resources.

In my next blog, I will demonstrate the use of motion sensor gestures and the advantages that they might bring to a mobile UX.