Implement gestures on Microsoft Surface

Question

Is there any tutorial or example available that shows how to implement a custom gesture into Microsoft Surface? After hours of googling I couldn't find any.

Unfortunately, the SDK does not even provide a framework to recognize gestures.

Im particularly intersted in gestures like a circle, or ? or x

Edit: Is there any news here? Or any good hints how to just recognize a X over a UI element?

Answer 1

Generally it is not a good idea to creat complex gestures like that in your application because they are really hard for people to discover. That said, you could track the touches to create a polyline and then apply an algorithm like the one outlined at

http://faculty.washington.edu/wobbrock/pubs/uist-07.1.pdf

to distinguish the path in a set of gestures.

Another option, but maybe not what you want is to use the SurfaceInkCanvas and recognize the text entered there.

Thanks!

Answer 2

Unfortunately the Surface doesn't have any gesture framework. You just have to dive in and do it yourself by tracking Contacts as they move, appear, and disappear.

Answer 3

In the meantime I implemented my own gesture recognition tool following this documentation

If somebody is interested, I could share the source.