Google’s Motion Sense hands-on: Controlling games and apps with gestures

During a session at Google’s I/O 2015 conference headlined by the Advanced Technologies and Projects Group (ATAP), engineers demoed what they called Project Soli, a novel gesture-recognition technology bound for handheld devices. The promise of the tech was that you could interact with things without actually touching them, which would ostensibly open up all manner of new ways of performing tasks.

After a little over four years in development, Soli emerged in the Pixel 4 series as the gesture-detecting Motion Sense. So was it worth the wait? We used the Pixel 4 for a week to put Motion Sense through its paces. While our impressions are on the whole quite positive, it’s clear Soli is a long way from fulfilling its potential.