What is Motion Sense good for…
After two days of the Google Pixel 4 usage, here are my thoughts about the Motion Sense/Soli feature…
First of, I think that many (if not all) “consumer” reviews of the Pixel 4 missed the real point of the technology by only focusing on the most obvious feature.
Is the swipe to change song a gimmick? It is. Is pinching the Pikachu a gimmick? No doubt. But that only means that there are still no real “obvious” use cases for the gestures technology, not that the technology is not useful.
The usefulness can be seen when you look at the phone itself and how you use it.
Presence
Motion Sense can detect presence and it makes use of it in four very interesting ways:
- Turn off the always on screen when no one is nearby to save battery – in practice, this works very well. Looking from the distance, you can see that the screen is off, but while walking to the phone it wakes up, about a step or two away.
- Detect reaching for the phone – by utilizing this info it can react to the users needs much sooner than touch or accelerometer would. That means the phone can start face unlock or show useful info on the screen about a second sooner.
- It knows when you’re paying attention – the screen turning off while looking at it is a thing of the past. I know that some other phones (Samsung) had this before, but doing it with a dedicated hardware instead of a camera is just much more robust.
- Predict your moves – when the phone rings, it tries to get your attention (be that for an alarm or a call). If you’re reaching for the phone, it means the sound did its job, so why not lower the volume until you do the action the phone expects you to do (silence the alarm, answer/reject the call, etc.)
Gestures
This is a part that is not yet utilized enough, but I see a lot of potential in the future:
- Swipe to change the song – no need to look at the phone. When it works (more on that later), it feels like magic.
- Swipe to silence the alarm – a great or dangerous feature, depends if you’re a morning person or not. Thankfully, it can be turned off.
- Pinching a Pokémon or waving to it – just a cute showcase for the technology, but allows the user to really get comfortable with it
In a lot of the Pixel 4 reviews, the reviewers concluded that the gestures don’t work very reliably, and I agree with that to some point. The waving detection is not perfect, but it works much better when you do it casually, without thinking to much about it. Also, it’s useful to know that the “gesture area” is over the whole phone and not just over the camera/forehead. It might even be more precise when you do the gesture over the screen. Think of it as a bubble over the whole phone.
The future
The thing that surprised me the most when I tried it out in practice is how good it actually works. Sure, the waving detection could be better, but everything else really seems to work as advertised. This leads me to believe that the hardware and the low-level software is really solid and there is no reason the user facing software wouldn’t get better with future updates.
Comparing it to other flashy features that manufacturers add to their phones to make themselves different, this one seems to be the most natural:
- Active edge / squeeze for Assistant – while it can be useful, I was never able to get used to it and would activate it by accident
- 3D touch – can be awesome for power users, but the downside is that it hides features from users without adding any indication that the features are available
- Heart rate sensor – much more useful on a wearable where it can work continuously instead of only when you remember to activate it manually
From my experience with the Motion Sense, I see a bright future for it. Unlike some other implementations (like using the regular front facing camera), this one is actually robust enough to be useful.
It still reminds to be seen if (and how) Google will expose the feature to developers, but even if that doesn’t happen, I think it still has a lot of potential on the OS level by predicting the phone usage.
I also see a lot of potential in battery usage savings – for now this is turning off the screen when you’re not nearby or going to standby when you’re not looking at the phone, but maybe in the future it could also do more, like decreasing the screen refresh rate when you’re not looking at it.
In my opinion, the best selling point for Motion Sense is that you (the user) don’t really need to think about it – it just helps the phone do its job better than before.