

Gestice – Unlock your Android by shaking it whilst wearing a Pebble - muratmutlu
http://gestice.org/

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deckiedan
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.

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marcochiang
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

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firloop
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.

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Zikes
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.

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solox3
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.

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srcreigh
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.)

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collyw
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.

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MacsHeadroom
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.

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pkill17
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.

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

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pkill17
When have you heard of someone getting strong-arm robbed and the robber NOT
taking their phone and their watch?

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RationPhantoms
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.

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srcreigh
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!

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rld
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.

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

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ZoF
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".

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

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PeterWhittaker
Nice, cool idea.

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kaishiro
Agreed.

