Change your doorbell, change your life

The new 3D feature is known as “Bird’s Eye View”, and the problem it solves is this: Ring’s video doorbells have always had motion-sensing video cameras in them, that will record video and send you an alert whenever anyone or anything enters any motion-sensing zones you’ve set up in the Ring app.

But zones could only ever be defined in two axes, X and Y. It was impossible to exclude motion based on how far away it was from the doorbell (the Z axis), meaning that for anyone whose doorbell has a view not just of their property but also of the street beyond the property (as we have here in the Digital Life Labs) motion sensing was useless.

It would alert you whenever someone walked onto your property, yes, but it would also alert you whenever someone drove or walked along your street. You’d get so many unwanted alerts and recordings, you’d eventually turn the feature off altogether and look for some other solution to getting alerts when someone entered your property.

(Our solution was to mount a separate Ring Stick-Up Cam at the edge of the property, looking inwards, and use its motion sensing camera to trigger the Ring doorbell’s camera to record, giving us two videos from two angles for every event. There’s a feature in the Ring app that lets you link two devices together like that, and it’s pretty nifty.)

Bird’s Eye View, which was already on the mains-powered Ring doorbell but never on the battery-powered doorbell until now, adds a radar to the doorbell, to let you define motion-sensing zones in X, Y and Z dimensions.

Your Ring’s video camera can see the street, but if the street is beyond the outer distance limit you defined for your motion-sensing zones, it won’t trigger an alert or recording.

Be warned, though, the user interface for setting up the Bird’s Eye View is just awful, especially on a mobile phone where the radar boundaries are difficult to select and move with your finger. We ended up switching to a tablet and using a stylus to grab the boundary markers, in desperation.

And if that wasn’t awful enough, the user experience is doubly awful here in Australia (and I imagine many other countries outside the USA), where the Mapbox satellite imaging system Amazon provides to help you define your radar boundaries is so low-resolution as to be worse than useless.

(In my mind’s eye, I can see the Ring software engineers in Santa Monica checking the user experience at their own home address, where the Mapbox API doubtless provides nice, sharp satellite images that help them find the street, and then not bothering to see how it works in the rest of the world.)

Even when you do manage to wrestle with the app to set the boundaries you want, there’s still a decent chance it won’t quite be right. It took us perhaps five or six rounds of trial and error, setting boundaries on the phone and then seeing what sort of alerts we got over coming days, before we were finally satisfied with the result.

But then!

Then the 3D motion sensing worked like a charm. It now ignores people and cars walking and driving down the street, but warns us and shoots a little video when they get too close.

As well as linking two Ring devices (the new 3D doorbell and the Stick-Up Cam) together so they work in unison, we’ve also linked them to our hallway lights, so they come on when motion is detected by either camera.

I know for a fact that’s saved us from being burgled at least once in the past, using just the motion sensing in the Stick-Up Cam. There’s Ring footage of a masked burglar about to break into the Labs, but then looking up to see the hallway lights come on and running away.

Like I said, it’s life-changing stuff. It’s a jungle out there, and technology like this can help tame it.

Or, if not a jungle, then a busy street.

Ring Battery Video Doorbell Pro

• Likes: A 2D motion-sensing doorbell simply doesn’t work for many households. 3D motion sensing should fix that.
• Dislikes: Awful to set up.
• Price: $349