Professional Android Sensor Programming

Chapter 7

Determining Device Orientation

What's in this chapter?

Using the gravity sensor to determine orientation

Using the accelerometer and magnetometer to determine device orientation

Using the rotation vector synthetic sensor to determine device orientation

Using OpenGL to perform simple screen drawing

Determining the orientation of a device is something that is useful to many apps. Games, for example, can use changes in a device's orientation as a way of allowing humans to interact and control a device. A human can change the orientation of a device and an app can react to that change in orientation. The sensors used to determine device orientation were introduced in Chapter 5. This chapter goes into more detail on how to effectively use some of these sensors and provides an example app to further demonstrate their usage.

The example app functionality described in this chapter determines whether a device is face up or face down. Multiple sensors can be used to determine device orientation of this nature, and the code presented in this chapter makes use of multiple sensors to detect the desired changes in orientation.

Previewing the Example App

When the device senses a change in the device orientation (with respect to the face of the device), the example app for this chapter uses the Text-To-Speech (TTS) facilities to announce that the device is face up or face down, as well as display the current orientation on the screen. In addition to the current orientation, the app also ...