Motiv added a very timely new feature to the second-generation Motiv ring: two-factor authentication (2FA).
If you're not familiar with 2FA, it's basically an extra level of protection on your accounts — an additional way to confirm your identity and protect against hackers. Motiv's 2FA works with Google, Dropbox, Amazon, and Facebook. Once you set it up using the smartphone app, you're good to go.
Here's how it works: When you log into a website, you'll be prompted for your password, as usual. But after you enter your password, the site will ask for your second level of authentication, which most people set as a six-digit code sent to their phone.
This is where you can use the Motiv ring instead — Motiv has a built-in gesture (basically, you flip your hand over a few times) and it should automatically fill in the code and let you into the website.
In my experience setting this up, I'd say it doesn't quite work as seamlessly as Motiv wants it to. I set up 2FA with three sites — Google (where I have two accounts), Facebook, and Dropbox — and could only get it to work on Dropbox, and only after I performed the gesture four or five times. In fact, I had to wave my hand around so many times in the course of trying to set this feature up that I ended up with a sore wrist.
Minor injury aside, I think there's a lot of potential here. The feature is forward-thinking, and particularly important in this day and age. If more people adopted two-factor authentication, they'd have a lower risk of their personal data being compromised. But the problem right now is that it's time-consuming and annoying to set up, and requires an extra step every time you want to log into a website. Having a ring that can do it in just a few seconds would alleviate a lot of headaches.
Motiv's 2FA feature isn't quite seamless yet, but my guess is that it will only get better over time.