Soli Radar-Based Perception and Interaction in Pixel 4 | Hacker News Reader

Soli Radar-Based Perception and Interaction in Pixel 4

ai.googleblog.com

38 pointstheafh35 comments

The tradeoff of putting a giant bezel on top of the phone in order to support being able to take a tiny number of actions in a few apps by waving your hands instead of touching your phone was... Probably not the right tradeoff. How often do you use your phone without, y'know, also holding it in your hand, and thus being able to touch it? And if they hadn't shipped Soli in the 4, I wonder if they would've saved enough manufacturing $$ to put an ultrawide camera in to compete with the iPhone 11...

From the current leaks it sounds like Soli isn't going to make it into the Pixel 4a; I'm curious whether it makes it into the 5 (and TBH hope it doesn't, unless they can figure out how to not make it take up a huge amount of bezel space).

Soli makes a lot of sense for the Google/Nest Home line of products, where you rarely are close enough to touch them. But for your phone? I just don't get it, and it seems like few people find it useful. I'm pretty surprised it shipped and would be very curious to learn how that happened, since it seems to have negatively impacted the product pretty heavily.

The Pixel 4a is a budget pixel. Of course it's not going to get Solo as for the Pixel 5...that remains to be seen since this is Google

Yeah, it's just interesting that in many ways it seems like the "budget Pixel" will actually be superior to the non-budget version: a bezel-less design (at least, according to many of the current leaks) because they aren't shipping the generally-pointless Soli hardware, and likely much improved battery life because they aren't shipping a 90hz screen (that the Pixel 4 couldn't handle anyway and has had to keep software-locked to 60hz half the time just to make it through the day on a single charge). The outdated, lopsided design and the anemic battery life were two of the most-disliked features in critic reviews of the 4; interesting that the 4a will basically be a better version of the 4, with the exception of missing the telephoto camera and (probably) lack of waterproofing.

Responding to critical feedback is a good and sensible thing to do. But ideally you would be able to get feedback on large issues internally, without needing the market to reject your product (Pixel 4 sales have been reported to be quite low): Soli seems so clearly useless, and caused such obvious product design tradeoffs, that I'm curious what led to it shipping in the first place. Was it an exec who was excited about Soli pushing it through? Was there a design/engineering communication breakdown? Would be very interesting to be a fly on the wall in the retro.

Maybe I'm an outlier here but I love my Pixel 4! Battery life isn't great, but the 90Hz screen is amazing and I definitely wouldn't go back to 60Hz if you paid me.

Aside from that, the Pixel 3a doesn't have wireless charging, so if that also applies to the 4a it's a total deal-breaker for me. And I really enjoy the performance of the Snapdragon 855 - especially with 90Hz forced at all times and animations tweaked to run at 2x speed, it's extremely noticeable how fast this phone is.

Not saying the Pixel 4a won't be a good phone, but the 4 is definitely better for premium features imo.

This wouldn't be the first time. The Pixel 3a was universally (as far as I saw) recommeded over the other Pixel 3 variants last generation.

Unless they use the data for targeted advertising (e.g. rub your eyes and get LensCrafters ads).

I have a Pixel 4, so far this feature has been near useless. At times it's nice to reach towards my phone and wake up the always-on display to see what notifications are present but that's about it. Song changing, etc feels gimmicky and impractical.

Overall, it feels like this is a tech demo lacking a killer app.

They didn't put Soli in the Pixel 4 for the users. They did it to gather sensor data for their ML dataset, for future applications.

The user-facing features are just there to encourage slightly more usage and justify including it.

disclaimer: This is pure speculation.

Yep. I have the Pixel 4 as well and keep it disabled. Needs a killer app.

Can confirm, despite the recent updates, the gestures are gimmicky and sometimes activate when not needed e.g song skips to the next one when reaching to pick up the phone.

The only truly useful thing is waking up the phone on detecting motion nearby, which could probably be done with a much simpler sensor.

From the videos I've seen, Soli has similar gestures to my old 2nd gen Moto X from 5+ years ago. It was neat for some things, but I don't really miss it.

Is there any way to access the "raw" sensor data from the Soli device in a Pixel 4, even with root? As far as I can tell, the best an Android developer can access is some pre-calculated gestures. I'd like to play with using this for other applications, not just snoozing my alarm more easily.

I don't think there is.

It would be a cool thing to play around with, and I wish they would make it available. The problem is the raw data isn't likely to be very useful without using ML to filter out false positives for any gestures you want to implement.

Motion sense could be used in a lot of applications.

I’d like to use an ATM without touching anything.

The coronavirus scare should open up markets.

Application #1: Personalized real world interactions, aka 24/7 tracking of real world behavior, putting online tracking to shame. Motion detection is one of those technologies where malicious use outweighs positive use by such a large margin that it deserves an outright ban.

Google is always afraid that someone else would overtake them as the #1 global aggregator of user behavior. They always acted swiftly to be on the forefront of new user tracking technologies, with more or less success. From Analytics to Doubleclick to Android to Maps To Plus. Sometimes they even tell themselves they are the good guys. I just wish they'd sometime realize the proper good guy behavior is to prevent the genie being released out of the bottle, not rush to be the ones releasing / acquiring the first / largest one.

I think it only works relatively close to the machine right?

I don’t want it to follow me into the bank. I only want to register my fingers when I’m a few inches away.

Soli is supposedly very accurate for minute movements and is very small and low-powered allowing it to be embedded in a phone, but this kind of tech has existed for a while. The Leap Motion comes in a really small, embeddable package and works over USB and can track hand movements quite accurately. It's been around for 10 years and was recently acquired by a haptics company. It's never managed to go mainstream or find any real applications outside of niche gaming.

> The Leap Motion comes in a really small, embeddable package and works over USB and can track hand movements quite accurately.

I've never tried one, but everyone I know that did said it was so bad they stopped using it after maybe 10 minutes of frustration.

"So bad" depends on what they were trying to do. If they were trying to observe skeletal tracking of their fingers, then they should be pretty happy. If they were trying to use it in place of a mouse or something, then it probably sucked because no one has solved the UX for one of these things which is my point. The Soli is even better than the Leap at tracking fingers, but exactly what good is that?

FWIW they're pretty different implementations, Leap used IR cameras, with all their drawbacks.

Yesterday I bought a six-pack without touching anything besides (regrettably) the door handle of the cooler and the six-pack itself. Paid by waving my Apple Watch over the POS machine.

It occurs to me that I like the model of carrying my own universal physical interface around with me more than I like sharing a domain- and location-specific one with other people.

Cool but completely useless on my phone.

I think that's the point. They want you to buy theirs.

Since I first saw the Soli demo video some years ago, I have been waiting to buy a small physical hackable version of the product.

Adding it to a phone seems like an unintelligent move -- maybe they should release a smart watch (if they know how)?

Guess I will have to wait at least a few years more.

What is the point of putting motion sense in a device that spends its entire life either in your hand or within arm's reach? They stuck a kinect in a phone but won't give us a damn headphone jack?

Seems better suited to a Google Home device or a robot or something

I honestly feel the same way. The pixel 3a is the Android device for me.

I'm really excited for the 4a, but I can't really justify upgrading from the 3a yet. I honestly can't think of a single complaint about it; it's an amazing phone.

> Motion Sense additionally detects when you're near your phone and when you reach for it, allowing your Pixel to be more helpful by anticipating your actions, such as by priming the camera to provide a seamless face unlock experience, politely lowering the volume of a ringing alarm as you reach to dismiss it, or turning off the display to save power when you’re no longer near the device.

I don't know how that's much better than lift to wake, unless you intentionally loom over your phone to unlock it.

There is no way in hell it has the kind of viewing angle to pick up my hand more than a fraction of a second before I touch the phone. Not that it matters, since the camera and the accelerometer can do all those things already.

I am reminded of the radio in the book "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", where things had gotten to the point that you merely had to wave at it to change the channel.

Could this be used as an input method in games or music apps?

Touchscreens are such crap to use.

I'd much rather have a device with a keyboard..

I wish the Palm Pre would have taken off. Loved the keyboard layout; it was extremely well thought out

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