I want to be able to detect someone's finger drawing a circular motion on the screen - as if they were drawing an 'O'. Is this possible with UIGestureRecognizer?
I think the answer to this depends on your definition of circular motion and how you intend to use it. For example, do you want to know how many degrees along a circle the users finger has travelled? Or, do you only care about a circle being completed? What is the degree of accuracy you require? Do you want to allow for the motion to be interrupted or does this have to be more of a touch-down > draw-circle > touch-up (in other words, single motion)?
One approach would be to define a bunch of rectangular zones along the circumference and detect if the user is touching these in sequence. This can provide you with direction and a coarse indication of angle.
Another approach is to store the points between touch down and touch up and do some filtering and curve fitting to figure out what shape is approximated by the points. First low-pass-filter using a basic FIR filter and then look at the dx and dy from point to point. A circle (as a series of arcs) will have to fall within a certain range of slope changes from point to point, otherwise you have some other shape.
Yet another approach is to use a Neural Network to take the points and tell you what the shape looks like.
I think this may be what you need
How to detect circular gesture via Gesture Recognizer?
Instead using a gesture recognizer, this project reacts to circular motions tracking the angle of UITouch events.
My answer to my question:
I used this: http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/04/detecting-circle-gesture.html
.. but turned the CircleView into a custom UIGestureRecognizer. Everything lovely.
No, it doesn't recognize natively a circular motion.
You have to implement your own method to do that.
Here's how i needed to do it using the touches callbacks in my view controller but this could be made into a gesture too. Note, I was trying to detect multiple circle motions (2 or more clockwise or counterclockwise circles made during a touch event.
Store touchesMoved CGPoints in an array.
Create a min/max rect of all the points in your history array.
Divide this min/max rect into 4 smaller rects.
Assign each history point a quadrant using CGRectContainsPoint() for each of the 4 quadrants
A clockwise motion will have quadrants ascending. A counter-clockwise motion will have quadrants descending.
Check the ratio of width/height if you want to detect circles vs ovals
Related
I am making a vintage phone and got a working starting code where user moves his fingers over a UIImageView numbers and it rotates dial. It then moves it back to original position. See screenshot.
The three problems that I can't seem to figure out are;
How can I restrict user to rotate only in clockwise direction? Currently user can move it in any direction (clockwise and counter clockwise)
How can I detect which number that user selected? Meaning user touched 1 or 3 or 5? I need this info so that I can stop the rotation when that number reaches the bar on the right.
In my current code when I stop the rotation and let go of the circle, it moves back to it's place by moving back counter clockwise. It works well if I select 1,2,3,4 but for any number 5 and up the dial moves clockwise back to its original position. How can I force counter clockwise motion on touchesEnded?
Let’s assume that you’re talking about this gesture:
Source.
Build a single-touch rotation gesture recognizer. After building the gesture recognizer correctly, you can just look at the rotation and see what to do with the rotary pad.
There are several things you’ll consider when building a single-touch rotation gesture recognizer. If you look at UIRotationGestureRecognizer, it uses connection between two touches, backed by two fingers, to derive the current angle, then compares the angle to the previous angle, derived from an earlier touch change event, to see the delta.
Measuring the current angle
It takes two points to form a line and you need a line to know the angle. If you’re working with only one touch, you need an anchor point. There are many ways to send an anchor point to your gesture recognizer, and since you’re likely going to build a custom class, use delegation.
Accumulating rotation counts
If you simply note the angle and send off messages during touch changes, it’ll sometimes work. However, if you’d like to implement hysteresis (e.g. this rotary dial will only rotate once clockwise, then it tightens up), you’ll need to accumulate rotation counts for both clockwise and counter-clockwise directions.
Fortunately, you can assume that a) the touch events will not get dropped too often, and b) simply comparing the current angle against the past angle, seeing if they cross quadrant boundaries, will suffice.
For example:
If the touch moved from the top-left quadrant into the top-right quadrant, add one to the rotation count.
If the touch moved from the top-right quadrant into the top-left quadrant, subtract one from the rotation count.
(Yup, this actually works.)
Emitting the correct, accumulated rotation
If you want to emit rotation information exactly like how UIRotationGestureRecognizer did, there will be four things you’re tracking.
Starting Angle: The angle between a connection from the anchor point to the starting touch, and a connection from the anchor point to a fixed reference point.
Current Angle: The angle between a connection from the anchor point to the current touch, and a connection from the anchor point to a fixed reference point.
Rotation Count: The number of clockwise revolutions derived from continuously comparing the current value of Current Angle against its last value (as talked about in the last section). If the touch is moving counter-clockwise, then this count will go into negative.
You’ll provide Rotation Count * 2_PI + (Current Angle - Starting Angle) as the rotation.
OK, I would take a different approach. First, you want to create a RotaryDial class to encapsulate all of the behavior. Then you can just plug it into any view as you see fit.
To keep things simple I would consider making each number button a movable UIImageView, call it RotaryDialDigit or something like that. You would instantiate and place ten of those.
The dial "frame" would just tag along for the ride as the user moves one of the RotaryDialDigit buttons. It's just an image (unless you want the user to be able to touch it and do something with it.
From there, knowing which button is being held down and limiting its rotation to a given direction as well as stopping at at the bar is fairly easy stuff.
By using a protocol you can then have the RotaryDial instance tell the container when a number has been dialed. To the container RotaryDial would feel like a keypad sending a message every time a button is pressed. You really don't want the container bothering with anything other than completed number selections.
To detect which number is touched, when you create each number you should set the tag value of its UIView. Then when the user touches the number you can detect which UIView object it was by checking that tag value.
For the rotation problem, I'd suggest looking at how you are calculating the angle. At a guess I'd say for numbers greater than 4 (which you discern from the tag) you need to do something like subtract the angle you are currently calculating from 360 degrees (well 2Pi). (But I have a head cold right now so the actual math is escaping me :-) )
Without seeing your code, I assume the numbers are a static image and you are animating the finger holes as they rotate past each number. If so:
Detecting which number: defina a CGRect around each button. When the user taps the screen, check which rectangle contains the tap location.
Controlling rotation direction: as the user drags their finger, comtinuously calculate the angle from the dial stop to the current tap location. If the angle moves in the wrong direction, dont update the position of the finger hole. Note that trig functions return vales from +Pi to -Pi radians. For the digits greater than 5, rather than handle negative angles you will probably want to add 2Pi radians ( or 360 degrees) to the angle.
Rotating wrong way: the digits below 5 are generatting angles in the range of 0 to -Pi. Without seeing code, I suspect adding 2Pi to the angle will correct your rotation direction.
Here is a better dial:
Have fun!
I am trying to build an app for the iPhone 4 which enables the user to "point" at a hardcoded destination and a dot appears where the destination is located.
First, i use the compass to make a horizontal compass(this will cover the left/right rotation):
// Heading
nowHeading = heading.trueHeading;
// Shift image (horizontal compass)
float shift = bearing - nowHeading;
destinationImage.center = CGPointMake(shift+160, destinationImage.center.y);
I shift the dot 160 pixels because the screen is 320 pixels width. My question is now, how can I expand this code to handle up and down? Meaning that if i point the phone down in the table, the dot wont show.. I have to point (like taking a picture) at the destination in order for it to be drawn on the screen. I've already implemented the accelerator. But i don't know how to unite these components to solve my problem.
Bearing should depend on the field of vision of the camera. For iPhone 4 the horizontal angular view is 47.5 so 320 points/47.5 = xxx points per degree, use that to shift horizontally. You also have to add an adaptive filter to the accelerometers, you can get one from the AccelerometerGraph project from Apple.
You have the rotation in one axis (bearing) you should get the rotation on the other two from the accelerometers. The atan2 of two axis give you the rotation on the third. Go to UIAcceleration and imagine an axis physically piercing the device if that helps and do double xAngle = atan2(acceleration.y, acceleration.z); So once you have the rotation upside down you can repeat what you did for the horizontal with the vertical field of view, eg: 60 for the iPhone.
That is going to be one rough implementation :) but achieving smooth movement is difficult. One thing you can do is use the gyros to get a faster response and correct their signal periodically with the accelerometers. See this talk for the troubles ahead: Sensor Fusion on Android Devices. Here is a website dedicated to the Kalman Filter. If you dare with Quaternions I recommend "Visualizing Quaternions" from Andrew J. Hanson.
It sounds like you are trying to do a style of Augmented Reality. If that. Is the case there are several libraries and sample code suggested here:
Augmented Reality
I'm trying to make an analog clock for the iPhone, in which the clock hands will automatically update to the current time. I also want the clock hands to be images, unlike this: http://iphone-dev-tips.alterplay.com/2010/03/analog-clock-using-quartz-core.html. What would be the easiest way to create this using CALayers to rotate the images/hands?
There are two properties of CALayers that may be of interest to you - the anchorPoint and the transform. Set the anchor point at the origin around which you want to rotate the images, calculate the angle of rotation, make a transformation matrix from it (using CATransform3DMakeRotation around the appropriate axis) and set the transform on the layer.
It's all explained in detail here.
I've hooked up a UITapGestureRecognizer to a UIImageView containing the image I'd like to display on an iPad screen and am able to consume the user taps just fine. However, my image is that of a hand on a table and I'd like to know if the user has tapped on the hand or on the table part of the image. I can get the x,y coordinates of the user tap with CGPoint tapLocation = [recognizer locationInView:self.view]; but I'm at a loss for how to map that CGPoint to, say, the region of the image that contains the hand vs. the region that contains the table. Everything I've read so far deals with determining if a CGPoint is in a particular rectangular area, but what if you need to determine if that CGPoint is located in the boundaries of a more irregular shape? Is that even possible? Any suggestions or just pointing me in the right direction would be a big help. Thanks!
You could use pointInside:withEvent: to define the hit area programmatically.
To elaborate, you just take the point and evaluate to see if it falls in the area you're after with a series of if statements. If it does, return TRUE. If it doesn't, return FALSE. If this is related to this post, then you could use a circular conditional to compare the distance of the point to the center of your circle using Pythagorean Theorem.
late to the party,
but the core tool you want here is a "point in polygon" routine.
this is a generic approach, independent of iOS.
google has lots of info,
but the general approach is:
1) define your closed polygon.
- it sounds like this might be a bit of work in your case.
2) choose any point not equal to your original point.
(yes, any point)
3) for each edge in the polygon,
determine if the ray from your original point through the seconds point intersects with that polygon edge.
- this requires a line-segment-intersect-ray routine, also available on the 'tubes.
4) if the number of intersections is odd, it's inside the polygon.
if the count is even, it's outside.
for general geometry-type issues,
i highly recommend Paul Bourke: http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/geometry/insidepoly/
You can use a bounding rectangle that covers most or all of the hand.
If the user is using his finger to tap either the hand or the table, I doubt that you want him or her to be extremely precise with the tap.
An extension of the bounding rectangle answer,
you could define several smaller bounding rectangles that would approximate a hand without covering the rest of the screen.
OR
you could use a list of rectangles, for each of your objects and put the hand at the end of the list. In this case, if you had a tap on button X on the top right hand of the screen which is technically inside the hand rectangle, it would choose the button X because that rectangle is found first.
define the shape by a black and white bitmap (1 bit per pixel). Check if the particular bit is set. This would eat a lot of memory if you had a lot of large shapes, but for one bitmap with a hand, it should not be a big deal.
define the shape as a polygon. Then you need to do point-in-polygon test. Wikipedia has a wonderful article on this, with links to code here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_in_polygon
iPad libraries might have this already implemented. Sorry, I cannot help you there, not an iPad developer.
I am trying to figure out how can you drag an image while constraining its movement along a certain path.
I tried several tricks including animation along a path, but couldn't get the animation to play and pause and play backwards - so that seems out of the question.
Any ideas ? anyone ?
What you're basically trying to do is match finger movement to a 'translation' transition.
As the user touches down and starts to move their finger you want to use the current touch point value to create a translation transform which you apply to your UIImageView. Here's how you would do it:
On touch down, save the imageview's starting x,y position.
On move, calculate the delta from old point to new one. This is where you can clamp the values. So you can ignore, say, the y change and only use the x deltas. This means that the image will only move left to right. If you ignore the x and use y, then it only moves up and down.
Once you have the 'new' calculated/clamped x,y values, use it to create a new transform using CGAffineTransformMakeTranslation(x, y). Assign this transform to the UIImageView. The image moves to that place.
Once the finger lifts, figure out the delta from the original starting x,y, point and the lift-off point, then adjust the ImageView's bounds and reset the transform to CGAffineTransformIdentity. This doesn't move the object, but it sets it so subsequent accesses to the ImageView use the actual position and don't have to keep adjusting for transforms.
Moving along on a grid is easy too. Just round out the x,y values in step 2 so they're a multiple of the grid size (i.e. round out to every 10 pixel) before you pass it on to make the translation transform.
If you want to make it extra smooth, surround the code where you assign the transition with UIView animation blocks. Mess around with the easing and timing settings. The image should drag behind a bit but smoothly 'rubber-band' from one touch point to the next.
See this Sample Code : Move Me