House of cards
Have trouble with your credit cards? (No, not that kind of trouble….) While we wait for contactless retail technologies to appear everywhere, here’s a neat solution. The iCache can hold all your credit card info. Then you identify yourself by fingerprint and release the right info to the right terminal: swiper, bar code, wireless, whatever. This could reduce all the fumbling and forgetting that’s going on now.
The identifier currently known as prints
We’ve reported on fingerprint biometrics before, but Privaris’ keychain-sized device performs multiple functions–it can be used to open doors, verify computer users’ identities, etc., reducing the number of devices that a single user might have to carry around. Very cool.
Privaris Fingerprint Device Provides All-In-One Security
Fingerprints and thumb drives
The ClipBio is a flash drive with biometrics–only the correct fingerprint ID will allow it to be used. While we’ll raise the usual access objections on behalf of people without fingerprints, we also rather like the swing-out handle.
Fingertip touch control
Atrua Wings is a tiny slice of a touchscreen, 20 mm wide and about 4 mm high. You can run your finger along it to have your fingerprint detected; you can pivot your finger on it to spin an object on the screen; you can select different digits by moving your finger left to right or on a diagonal. It’s intended to replace a keypad for mobile phones and other shrinky dinks. Although there may be advantages for people with really limited hand mobility, it’s bound to exclude many others with impaired dexterity, as well as most people with impaired vision or cognition. Let’s hope they remember redundancy, and keep the keypad, add speech recognition, etc.
Striking chords
Move over, fingerprint and eye biometrics; here comes verification by voice. Actually, not so much voice as vocal chords: the program listens to you read a few words, then “maps over 100 nodes in the vocal chords to provide a 3D model of the throat.” This means that temporary vocal changes such as a cold won’t affect recognition accuracy. Wonder if this has implications for creating better speech-to-text software?
Irises in bloom
The JPC1000 is a new biometric iris scanning device that can be used with a PC. It has potential for security applications that accommodate people who can’t use fingerprint biometric devices, and it’s harder to fool it with Play-Doh.
Biometric doorknob
“Users brush their finger across the knob to unlock the door.” If the door then automatically opened (and if biometric technology was harder to fool), you’d have a great almost-hands-free entry system.