Accelerometer-based Gestures, and Screen Orientation Capabilities of the Openmoko Neo FreeRunner, Alpha 2 Release

by Paul V. Borza, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , www.borza.ro

Introduction

Human-phone interaction is still limited to keyboard and touch screen for most mobile devices that are currently available on the market, although some of the phones are capable to sense much more; this is exactly the case of the Openmoko Neo FreeRunner that embeds two accelerometers, allowing us to measure acceleration values of ±2G, or ±8G.

The alpha 2 release of accelerometer-based gestures, and screen orientation project was conceived by Paul V. Borza, mentored by Daniel Willmann, and supported by Google Summer of Code 2008, and Openmoko Inc. This release includes a database containing 12 predefined gestures (e.g. shake-shake, forward-backward, horizontal circle, left, right, up, down, left return, right return, up return, down return, and z gesture), a gesture manager with a graphical user interface that enables any user to train these predefined gestures, a gesture recognizer that notifies the user of the recognized gesture, and support for all four possible screen orientations (e.g. portrait, inverted portrait, left landscape, and right landscape). One should see a live video demonstration of the alpha 2 release, running on the Openmoko 2008.8 distribution, on www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2S2rQUETwc.