Google today issued a blog post detailing two key new features of the forthcoming Pixel 4: Face Unlock and Motion Sense mid-air hand gestures.
Face Unlock is designed to be faster and more seamless than Apple’s implementation. It uses four infrared components: a dot projector, flood illuminator, and two cameras. With these components, it can recognize your face from any angle as you lift it, and fully unlock before you’re ready to touch the screen. Face Unlock will also work for secure payments and app authentication.
The Pixel 4 will also include a RADAR chip developed by Google as Project Soli. This enables Motion Sense, which can detect mid-air hand gestures made in front of the phone, such as waving your hand to skip songs, snooze alarms, and silence phone calls. The sensors for these new features take up space above the display, creating a “forehead” instead of the notch or all-screen design that has become standard in high-end phones recently.
Both features keep data locally for privacy. Facial recognition data is stored in Google’s custom Titan M security chip.
