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According to previous ATAP demos , the Project Soli radar system can sense and detect gestures being performed as far as 15 meters — roughly 49 feet — away.

Forty-nine feet! That's almost a third of the width of a U. And since it's using radar, not a camera, to "see" and interpret your hand gestures, you shouldn't have to position your hand directly in any line of sight in order for your commands to be detected. Imagine — provided, of course, that this all works as well as the demos suggest — what sorts of practical possibilities that could create for controlling your phone while you're driving, running, working out, working outside, or doing ahem anything else where your hands aren't readily available.

This last factor is huge: According to Google's ATAP group, the nature of the radar technology being used in the Pixel 4 allows the system to detect hand movements even through fabrics — without any visible path between your hand and the gadget. Again, we're going off of unproven information here and working without the context of the Pixel 4's specific implementation, but the technology's general capability certainly suggests the Soli-enabled gestures could work even when a phone is tucked away in a pocket, purse, or backpack. Intriguing, no?

Still, even if we go out on a limb and assume that this all works consistently well, even in messy real-world conditions, there's more to consider. No matter how much we may know about the technology behind Google's Pixel 4 gesture system, there's one big, prickly unknown — and that's what exactly the phone's gestures will empower us to do.

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In its initial tease of the feature this week, Google mentioned the system allowing you to skip songs, snooze alarms, and silence phone calls — three tasks that certainly make sense as things you'd want to do when you can't easily swipe around on your phone's screen, for one reason or another, but also a relatively limited set of actions for such a powerful-seeming piece of technology. Google also, however, said something that seems significant: "These capabilities are just the start, and just as Pixels get better over time, Motion Sense will evolve as well.

So what else could the system eventually accomplish? All it takes is a little creative thinking to imagine the possibilities.

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It's entirely conceivable to consider this technology letting you swipe your hand left or right from across the room to move through slides or images in a presentation you're casting to a larger screen — or to scroll through a document or web page in a similar manner. Adjusting volume from afar seems like an obvious possibility and one we've already seen demonstrated with Project Soli, in fact.

And it wouldn't be much of a stretch to think of the system integrating with connected smart hardware and allowing you to do things like adjust the level of light in a room by moving your hand up or down in a particular way. There's also the fact that the Pixel 4 will almost certainly just be the first of many Google-made devices to feature this technology.

Google itself suggested as much in its announcement: "Pixel 4 will be the first device with Soli" — thus implying it won't be the only. Over the past years, Google's ATAP team has talked about the Soli radar technology working with wearables, speakers, phones, computers, and even vehicles — all areas where Google has a hand in creating products. So, yeah: It's no huge stretch to say Soli could eventually become the common thread across Google's various device lines and serve as a distinguishing feature no other company is likely to match.

It could be the missing piece of the puzzle that really, truly shows off the value of Google's homegrown hardware effort and its end-to-end control of the entire user experience. For now, there's every reason to remain skeptical about how Soli will fare outside of Google's walls and how valuable it'll be from a tech-using-human perspective.

But there are also some pretty compelling reasons to be optimistic — to think that maybe, just maybe, there might be more to this than what we've seen before. Sign up for my weekly newsletter to get more practical tips, personal recommendations, and plain-English perspective on the news that matters. Contributing Editor JR Raphael serves up tasty morsels about the human side of technology. Hungry for more? Join him on Twitter or sign up for his weekly newsletter to get fresh tips and insight in your inbox every Friday.

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