Gestice – Unlock your Android by shaking it whilst wearing a Pebble | Hacker News Reader

Gestice – Unlock your Android by shaking it whilst wearing a Pebble

gestice.org

62 pointsmuratmutlu26 comments

Without context, that has got to be one of the most utterly bizarre headlines in history. Just imagine someone from 1980 trying to decipher what it means. :-)

About the only person who would believe it could be a genuine headline in 2014 would be Isaac Asimov - but his interpretation of what it meant would be... quite different.

There were definitely a lot of ways we could have done this! Thank you all for the feedback. We chose three gestures that made the most sense to us - shaking horizontally (x), vertically (y), and back and forth (z). It does look silly because we implemented a less sensitive gesture algorithm so that it doesn't unlock when your phone is in your pocket and you're walking around swinging your wrist.

The purpose of gestice (gesture + justice) is to add some security to those who don't typically add pin codes to their phones. It creates a new generation of two-step authentication for those who don't have a finger-print scanning smartphone! It's free for a limited time on our website so get em quick =)

Best, Marco

Cool idea, but if I owned a Pebble and wanted to do this, I'd probably just create a Tasker profile to accomplish the same thing rather than install another app.

i think it compares the shake profile from pebble to that of a phone and only unlocks if they match.

I'm shane from the gestice team page. You're absolutely right -- the gestures on the phone and the pebble have to be in sync to register and open your apps.

I've tried various Tasker solutions for this, but it doesn't work well for phones that are encrypted and secured with a password.

The closest thing I could find was a Tasker add-on that was given root permissions and disabled the password, unlocked, and re-enabled the password. At least, that's where my research led me, I could never get that to work.

To reinvent Gestice, set up a profile that is activated by the combination of "Bluetooth Connected" and "Shake Gesture", and runs the "Secure Settings: Pattern Lock Disabled" task to wake the phone up with no lock screen. Optionally, add an exit task that restores your lock screen.

The Secure Settings is being transitioned to something they called System+ right now, so YMMV.

With Gestice we tried to make it more secure by syncing the gesture on the pebble with the phone; I'm not sure that other apps provide this syncing functionality.

As well, Gestice keeps your screen locked with a PIN in addition to the synced-gesture unlock. This wasn't an easy engineering task -- it took a lot of persistence with with the Android APIs. (The only string attached is that Gestice has to be given a PIN for your lock screen, which it manages for you.)

So is this the most useful thing that you can do with a smartwatch so far?

I am somewhat skeptical about the uses for smart watches, when pretty much everyone has a phone in their pocket. On top of that a smart watch will need charged regularly.

I am sure some people will have a legitimate use for them, but shaking it to unlock a phone doesn't seem especially useful to me.

My Pebble's battery lasts 3-4 days with heavy use. After getting a pebble, my phone battery lasts almost twice as long as it used to since I no longer have to turn the screen on and unlock the phone in order to know what a notification was trying to tell me.

That's pretty useful imo.

As someone who wears a pebble 24x7, integrating these gestures into my life will take zero effort- guaranteeing a net benefit.

Not the most secure thing, but a cool idea. Compared to the traditional password/pattern unlock, there's a big security flaw; all I have to do is shake the watch next to the phone to unlock it. I don't even have to be the rightful owner or know the password/pattern, I just have to shake at the same time.

What's the chance of somebody losing their phone and their watch at the same time?

Losing, or placing them both in the same location while showering/changing at the gym?

When have you heard of someone getting strong-arm robbed and the robber NOT taking their phone and their watch?

The overarching point is that having your watch unlock your phone doesn't include any personal security barrier; I don't need to know some privileged information to unlock your device. All I have to do is shake your wrist and your phone at the same time.

> What's the chance of somebody losing their phone and their watch at the same time?

This question is loaded with the assumption that somebody has to lose them. No, it's enough for them to place them unsupervised in the same place, at the same time, regardless of how that's done. Examples:

* Four dudes rob you in a shady alley * Someone breaks into your home while you're sleeping * Someone goes through your things while you're changing at the gym, or even at the doctor's. * Someone grabs your phone while you're sleeping in a train * Someone steals your phone and spoofs the Pebble

The "what's the chance" route is ok for small-scale, low-sensibility deployment. If there's one chance in a million per year and there are 5,000 units deployed, 99% of which contain nothing but boring contacts lists, it's a reasonable route. Not ok from an engineering perspective, but ok from the point of view of a company that sells consumer devices, for whom product quality is nice to have, but not important.

Unless you've encrypted your phone, passwords and pattern unlocks only protect from casual attempts to break in. I see this in the same vein - sure, it's not going to protect you if someone steals both your watch and phone, but nor would pattern unlock, and nor would password unlock without the phone being encrypted.

Why can't they make the process a little more elegant than a shakeweight-esque motion? How sensitive is the accelerometer inside the pebble? I applaud them for their ingenuity though and I'd like to see them further develop the vision for motion based controls.

The accelerometer in the pebble is pretty sensitive (more than the wiimote). I wouldn't be surprised if they're using a really hacky algorithm to find gestures.

I'm a gestice engineer (Shane on the team page)

The accelerometer is plenty sensitive. The problem is to find a nice balance between making the actions easy and making them hard to do by accident. I was thinking that this might be resolved by adding another action to signify that a gesture is being done, such aa holding the lock button. And thanks for the applaud!

I couldn't imagine myself doing that somewhere with little room, like a crowded elevator or subway. The functionality is nice, but it looks utterly ridiculous.

Gestice of course is, in Italian, "he/she/it manages", although it could also be taken as "gesticulate".

The italian word of course is, in Italian, pronounced completely differently than by the student in the video.

I doubt their intention was anything other than a play on the word "gesture".

Not particularly new idea. In the days of OpenMoko they had this idea to do Bluetooth pairing by shaking two phones held together.

Nice, cool idea.

Agreed.

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