Topic awaiting preservation: Mouse Guestures

This isn't DHTML or JavaScript related but I felt the question best be asked to the poeple that hang out here.

I'm creating an Audio Player in Director inspired form all those wonderful win amp visualization. However, with this the Visualization is the Player. I know, it sounds strange but it's just an experiment. All practical elements of this interaction and being tossed out the window form the beginning. Yay!

Problem being, I'm having some issues with how to approach mouse gesturing. I made up some simple tests and they either didn't really work or they damn near crashed my computer they required so much processing.

Anyhow, I'm hoping some fresh input might give me some new insights on this. So, any ideas? Currently I'm testing logs of mouse coordinates for rough geometric patterns (patterns like those used in Opera, not actual shapes like used in Black & White, but shapes would rock too!), but I'm not sure if this is the most effective/accurate/fastest way of doing this so any suggestions would be appreciated.

Remember, I'm not actually doing this in JavaScript so don't bother with an code. I'm still trying to nail down concepts on how this is best achieved.

Not knowing Lingo, this is a pure guess, but I'm thinking it might be less processor-intensive if you just recorded the coordinates of the MouseDown event and then on MouseUp, you correlate the two coordinate pairs and take action. This would prevent you from using Opera-style patterns (like "right, then down"), but it's what I would do. You get eight mouse gestures out of it, at least.

That's an idea. Dead simple too. Yeah, thanks PT, I'll have a play with that.

Actually, I've decided to scrap this project. Well, at least, put it on hold for a while. It's just too much work for what I'd get out of it.

It sucks when you have to develop something that's getting graded. You have to focus on what will get you the most marks in the short amount of time you have, which usually ends up being something a million and one people have done before, or just something that's plain boring to make.

I keep thinking, "If I was better organised I'd have more time"... But I know that wouldn't happen. If I thought I had more time I'd dream up something even bigger. Does it ever get easier to estimate how long it'll take to actually see a project through to completion?

Arr well, another idea for my ever crowded shelf of "not enough time" ideas. Thanks for the suggestion though PT. I'll probably end up using those simplistic mouse gestures in the near future. I've decided to downgrade the progect to a series of "experiments in sound" in a somewhat similar way to how praystation does it's thing. Hmmm...

Instead of plotting coordinates and trying to get a matching shape out of that (hard), you could also just devide mousemovent in 4 general directions. up, right, down and left. When the user moves the mouse, you construct a string, adding the last direction the mouse went in as a character, repesenting the direction. (u, r, d, l for instance). Then you can link actions to those strings. a question mark can be made of a right, down, left and down: RDLD. etc.

sensitivity (to decide if a diagonal movement is either horizontal of vertical) is up to you, as well as "killing" the gesture for instance if the user is not gesturing at all, but just moving his mouse around (a distance limit will do imo)

I've tried the plotting coordinates way in javascript (and vml to visualise it), and it really doesn't work I've also made that second way in javascript, and that really works I've put it on my site as an option. (link in sig).

peterned

Clay: When I read your post I said to myself "hey' it sounds like Peter Nerderlof's implementation" I find your method ( building a string based on the direction ) really interresting. It's simple and extremely efficient. BTW, Congrats for your site.

I'm also exploring mouse gesture ( and gestural intefaces in general ) since ~2weeks to give an alternative way to navigate on the next version of my site.
For my implementation, I have some extra requirements :

.no need to hold down a button ( 'coz holding down a button selects anything and the dithered ghost looks jerky :

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

Wow, some nice ideas there Clay. I'll have to give that a try when I have time to scratch myself again.

Poi: I can't wait for that demo... your stuff always rocks.

Ini: You have exams! Curse you! I want exams too! I got nothing but one massive production assesment after another. Just one exam would save me so much time.

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Peter, have you had some feedback concerning your gestural navigation and how people use it ?

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I've only had positive feedback so far, most people seem to like it. When playing with it for a while I really miss it when going to other sites, especially the scrolling and history gestrues. I have to say though that this idea of adding direction identifiers to a string to get to a gesture is not originally mine. When I was poking around with tracking coordinates a friend pointed me to a mozilla plugin for mouse gestures.
When trying that out I noticed that the status bar displayed such a gesture string, and from that concept I built a script from scratch.

Maybe it would be good if there came a "standard" for this too. The danger of all kinds of scripts, plugins and browser features (Opera has its own gestures too :\ and I believe mac's have an OS wide system for it) is obviously that users can't switch between apps/systems because the gestures are different, and that's a terrible concept we've seen too often.
Similar to the standard button logo's on music systems (arrow lay, cube:stop) there should be standard unique gestures that do standard things. (Yeah, In a perfect world, I'll keep on dreaming now :P )

peterned