#490 – Using the InkCanvas to Recognize Gestures, part II

With the EditingMode of an InkCanvas set to GestureOnly or to InkAndGesture, the InkCanvas will attempt to recognize any gestures drawn using a mouse or a stylus.

You can handle the Gesture event of an InkCanvas and then call the GetGestureRecognitionResults to get a list of candidate gestures that the InkCanvas thinks that you drew.  In the example below, we get this list of gestures and dump them out to a debug window.

        private void ink_Gesture(object sender, InkCanvasGestureEventArgs e)
        {
            ReadOnlyCollection<GestureRecognitionResult> gestures = e.GetGestureRecognitionResults();

            foreach (GestureRecognitionResult gest in gestures)
            {
                Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("Gesture: {0}, Confidence: {1}", gest.ApplicationGesture, gest.RecognitionConfidence));
            }
        }

Below are some example gestures, followed by the list of GestureRecognitionResult objects. Each has a Confidence property that indicates how confident .NET is of the suggested result.

Advertisement

#489 – Using the InkCanvas to Recognize Gestures, part I

You can set the EditingMode of an InkCanvas to recognize gestures, rather than to let the users draw strokes onto the surface of the InkCanvas.  If you set the EditingMode to GestureOnly, the user cannot draw on the control, but can use the mouse or stylus to draw a gesture, which the InkCanvas will try to recognize.

In this mode, anything that you draw will show up as a stroke while you’re drawing it, but will then disappear as soon as you lift the mouse or stylus.

Drawing:

Done drawing:

As soon as you finish drawing, the InkCanvas will try to recognize what you drew.  It will fire the Gesture event, where you can ask it what gestures it thinks it recognized.

Gestures that the InkCanvas can recognize are listed in the System.Windows.Ink.ApplicationGesture enumeration.  These include things like: circles, squares, checks, and flicks in different directions.