Control Your Device without Touch with Hovering Controls

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We’ve all seen those Sci-Fi movies and salivated over their technology that allows the characters to perform all sorts of things just by waving their hands in the air. The thing is though, this sort of technology does exist, although nowhere near as advanced as what we see on the big screen. Sony Xperia Sola has its floating touch, Samsung Galaxy S4 has air gestures, and even doctors nowadays are using X-Box Kinect during cancer surgery. Users of other devices, however, can now also enjoy this sort of flexibility and novelty by simply using Hovering Controls.

Developed by XDA Senior Member forgin, Hovering Controls uses the proximity sensor of your device to register simple motions performed in front of your device. Predetermined apps can be launched by either hovering over the sensor, swiping once, or swiping twice. And silencing an alarm or ringtone is as simple as a hand wave. You can also control your media playback this way, allowing you to change to the next or previous song or video without ever turning on the phone screen and physically touching it.

Two modes are available, both offering a different take on opening apps:

Target mode: open a pre-determined app with a set gesture Carousel mode: open up apps from a set list of apps

If you’re not sure what sort of gesture is recognized by Hovering Controls, there’s a testing mode where you can test different motions to see what the app registers them as. Forgin has also included a widget from which you can toggle the app on and off.

Hovering Controls is compatible with any device running Android versions 2.2 or newer, and is free exclusively from the XDA forums. If you’d like to check this out, head over to the application thread for more details and download.