I have an Activity that usually needs some time to watch the screen without interacting with it.
The problem is that the screen turns off, just like wit
Add android:keepScreenOn="true" to some widget in your layout XML resource for this activity. So long as that widget is visible on the screen, the screen will not turn off automatically.
EDIT:
A WakeLock, as suggested by other answers, technically will work. But then you have to manually release the WakeLock (if you mess that up, the screen will stay on a long time). And, since you could mess it up, you need the WAKE_LOCK permission. Using keepScreenOn avoids all of that.