Detecting device shakes

A fairly common gesture that can be implemented using sensors is the shake gesture. This can be used to shuffle cards in a game or tracks in a playlist.

How to do it...

To detect a shake, we will need to record the data from the accelerometer and determine whether a shake has occurred:

1. First, we implement the ISensorEventListener interface, and register it with the manager:

   var manager = SensorManager.FromContext(this);
   var type = SensorType.Accelerometer;
   var accelerometer = manager.GetDefaultSensor(type);
   manager.RegisterListener(
     this, accelerometer, SensorDelay.Fastest);

2. Then, we will need a few fields that will store the values across the accelerometer events:

   private int lastUpdate;
   private float lastX;
   private float lastY;
   private float lastZ;

3. As we are also going to process shakes, we will need a field to hold the shake related data:

   private int lastShake;

4. In the OnSensorChanged() method, we ensure that we only process the events after a reasonable interval of time...