Notices

Intro: I have been traveling a lot lately, often with n900 in my jacket pocket, listening to music. Having second hand occupied, it was difficult to control music, having to take out the device, unlock it press the button, lock it, put it back in my pocket.


Idea: Have an app turning the whole screen into gesture recognition area. The gestures should be designed so they can be uniquely recognized, regardless of the device's orientation. Simply put the hand in your pocket where the phone is and perform simple gesture, whatever the current orientation of the device is.

Not getting into technical details (this can be a standalone player, plugin for existing player, standalone app controlling other players), what do you think about idea? Would anyone (besides me ) use it?

One word: thisisgreatidea!

I like this idea. Maybe we can use a common set of D-Bus events so that any supporting media player can be controlled this way? The controller app itself could then be very lightweight.

Also it would have to be fullscreen, otherwise you could accidentally click on the window controls.

There was an app like this for s60 which i used to have. Basically you wave the hand from one side to the other and it changed the song back n forth. It would be great if you could use such an app while screen lock is activated because it would be a lil useless if you have to unlock it and then wave to it. Please do impliment it with the fmradio aswell as i use that everyday on my way to work. It is the one app i use the most. Thanks

@pycage, I like the idea. Maybe there are already some standard events (headphoned uses this to pause playback?), if not it would be nice to agree upon some set. Also for the future MeeGo framework, so all the media players could be controlled with single DBus API.

I will write a simple mockup in my free time, to see if this can really work.
Anyone knows any gesture recognition algorithm I could use here?

Unfortunately headphoned talks to each supported application through the application's own D-Bus interface. But I think it's really about time to think about a common set of D-Bus events.

I'm not much into gesture recognition, but a simple approach would be dividing the screen into sectors. A simple state machine could keep track of the gestures and raise an event in case of recognition.
I think with some nice graphics we could quickly build up such an app with Qt Creator.

I would like to have proper gesture recognition, to allow any device orientation and any size and place of the gestures. I have an idea how to implement few very simple patterns that could be used for a prototype.

I completely agree that the gestures has to be direction-less. Otherwise you'll have to deal with identifying the device's current orientation in your pocket before knowing which way is which.

Few ideas for the gestures:

1x Clockwise rotation = skip 1 song fwd
1x C-Clockwise rotation = skip 1 song back
Continuous clockwise rotation = seek fwd in a song
Continuous counter clockwise rotation = seek backwd in a song
Tap once = Pause/play
Double tap = ...
Triple tap = ....

actually.. i'd just like a music player that isn't s*** with a playlist of 5000 songs