I am working on gesture recognition on iOS devices. The official documentation at http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/EventHandling/Conceptual/EventHandlingiPhoneOS/MultitouchEvents/MultitouchEvents.html is useful to understand how gesture recognition works and can be incorporated inside an app. My question is how can gestures be recognized anywhere, e.g. the home screen, or in any other app, by an app running in the background. I am open to solutions referring to private API's. Is the GraphicsServices framework relevant in this case ? As an example, the display recorder app in the cydia store is able to do it.
Another approach possible is by use of gesture recognition devices like kinect for windows or Leap for Mac.
Please post your suggestions. Thanks.
I guess you are asking for a way to have "global gestures" which I think you can achieve by attaching the Gesture Recognizers to the Window or your main ViewController, this can be useful to achieve thing like when the user swaps from the left edge to right and you want to display a hidden menu (just like in the facebook application)
Without jailbreak I think connecting the iPhone/iPad to another gesture device such as the Kinect or Leap you would need to write a lot of code, first you'd need to write code for the interface so you can comunicate with the Kinect, this asuming you found a way or created one to plug the kinect to your iOS device, then you would need to write code to capture the input provided from the Kinect and finally "recognize" manually the gestures. It would be way easier if Microsoft provided any SDK for this.
For the Leap it's a similar method however they have an SDK for OS X which probably can be ported to iOS
hope this gives you a little insight.