If you’re paranoid about having to give your fingerprints because you don’t like touching something that a thousand people before you have touched – you’re not alone. And if technology continues progressing, it might not be a problem anymore in the future. The folks over at Advanced Optical Systems (AOS) have managed to come up with a new fingerprint scanner that can authenticate an individual’s identity from up to two meters away! Talk about effective.
The device is called the AIRprint (I smell an Apple lawsuit coming) and works by “analyzing reflections of polarized light on a person’s hand by two cameras, one receiving vertically polarized light and the other receiving horizontally polarized light.” Currently it is in a prototype stage and is only able to handle one fingerprint at a time, and users have to maintain a fixed distance in order to get scanned. AOS plans to improve this when the product is finally launched.
The AIRprint is said to take only 0.1 second to scan a print, while it takes about 4 seconds to process it. Possible uses for such devices include the military, where it can be used to identify allies from foes or targets from a distance, solving issues with friendly fire and capturing impostors. Though with such technology, it makes you think about how easy it’s going to be to steal fingerprints from a distance as well.
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