Smart phones and tablets contain several kinds of “sensors” to sense information about their environment. For example, an accelerometer provides information about movement of the phone (or tablet) – letting us know the speed and direction of travel in x, y and z coordinates (three dimensions).<\/p>\n
The orientation sensor tells us if the phone is tilted to the left or right, or up or down (or flipped over). App Inventor provides a simple to use interface to the orientation sensor. We can use this to control a sprite or ball on the screen – by tilting our phone, we can make graphic items move around on the screen!<\/p>\n
Sample source code that you can download is at the bottom of this post!<\/em><\/p>\n After going through this tutorial, you now know enough to create your own interactive smart phone game!<\/p>\n Review<\/strong><\/p>\n Before we get started, please review these earlier tutorials:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What the Sample Program Does<\/strong><\/p>\n The sample program, in this tutorial, adds the orientation sensor to the earlier sprite-based animation. By tilting the phone, we control the image sprite (or if you prefer, a ball object) on the screen. The sprite moves in the direction of the phone’s tilt angle – the steeper the tilt, the faster the sprite moves in the tilt direction.<\/p>\n Here’s a video clip to illustrate how this works:<\/p>\n\n