How your future phone camera will scan your live skin
Tech Industry
This time next year you could have a phone that scans your face but also tries to check to see if you're actually alive before logging you in.
What am I talking about?
Well Trinamix which is a German based sensor tech company is working on a technology that will allow you to determine what the material is that a face scanning phone can look at.
When I tried a demo of dynamics sensor tech in New York, I shot a video of it on my phone and I'll guide you through it.
There were two parts to the demo.
In one.
I looked at a phone that was rigged up with their extra sensor tech, and it could recognize that it was looking at a face and the dot projector technology could recognize that it was a 3D face.
And then there was a third part that checked whether there was live skin or not.
But the tech shows that you can look at something like my face versus something like a rubber mask where it would not recognize that there was a live skin and that would be the difference.
The interesting thing about trend annex is technology is it's built off of the same core tech.
That is already used in face scanning phones like the iPhone Ten or the Google Pixel Four.
Those phones currently will send out a dot projection of infrared lasers that will get a 3D map of where your face is, and that's used to log you in.
And will also to be able to take a 2D photo of your face.
Now the extra level that Tran amyx is doing here is that it can measure the backscatter from the infrared.
That extra level of reflection is a little different, according to them based on what material it's projecting off of.
And they've been able to find a way to read differences in that backscatter and determine if there's Blood running through your skin versus dead skin which is weird.
Or if it's metal or wood so you could use this to detect a variety of materials which is pretty crazy.
The second demo I tried showed exactly that.
Hooked up to a computer, they showed to green blocks That looked pretty similar, but the materials were different.
One was plastic and one was wood.
When you looked at it through their camera displayed on the screen, the two materials were differently color coded.
The idea is that again, it could register that the backscatter was different.
Now you'd have to then have each app or each software developer decide what those materials are.
But you could code say something that's metal, something that's wood.
You could put it in a car cabin, according to Trinamics and eventually be able to detect whether a seatbelt is on and look for that material specifically, or whether there's an actual human passenger in the car.
So that could be a lot of safety applications that are really intriguing.
Another thing that they're looking at is stuff like augmented reality and virtual reality.
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I put on a VR headset all the time, and it won't recognize the stuff in my room.
Well, let's say there's a kid running across or a dog.
Maybe this type of tech could scan a room and recognize when there's a person who's entering versus just an object.
That's probably a little further down the road.
train amyx does say that Android phones using their technology are going to ride by 2021.
And the company is already partnering with Qualcomm.
And to go further, they said that this tech is going to be available on lower end phones worldwide.
Now we're not really seeing face scanning phones right now beyond the mid to high range.
Keep an eye on it.
And hopefully we'll be able to check it out in a year and see what this stuff turns out to be.
I got an early sneak preview of this tech at work here in New York.
And you could see a lot more algorithmic tricks like this in phone technology in the future.
