Bank cards are already being replaced by phones and wristbands that have payment technology built-in but the latest threat to the lowly plastic in your pocket could be your face.
A Finnish startup called Uniqul has launched what it calls the first ever payment platform based on facial recognition.
The system doesn’t require a wallet, bank card or phone – instead a camera is positioned at the checkout and takes a photo of a shopper’s face when they are ready to pay.It then scans a database for the face and matches it to stored payment details in order to complete the transaction.
Advertising network Amscreen recently launched a unique face-detection technology, originally developed by automated audience measurement firm Quividi.
Cameras have been installed in Amscreen’s digital advertising displays that can scan a person’s face and determine their gender, age, date, time and volume of the viewers.This is so adverts are served to the most appropriate audience.
Amscreen already has over 6,000 digital screens seen by a weekly audience of over 50 million people.
This lack of recognition is precisely what the VIP-identification technology designed by is supposed to prevent.
The U.K.-based company already supplies similar software to security services to help identify terrorists and criminals. The ID technology works by analyzing footage of people’s faces as they walk through a door, taking measurements to create a numerical code known as a “face template,” and checking it against a database.
In the retail setting, the database of customers’ faces is comprised of celebrities and valued customers, according to London’s . If a face is a match, the program sends an alert to staff via computer, iPad or smartphone, providing details like dress size, favorite buys or shopping history.
It began, just 15 years ago, as a service that enabled you to type a request into a personal computer and be given links to associated websites. Things have rather moved on. Soon Google hopes to have the ubiquitous presence of a personal assistant that never stops working, capable of conversing naturally in any language. Ultimately, as Page and co-founder Sergey Brin have asserted, the goal is to insert a chip inside your head for the most effortless search engine imaginable.
Where will it end? Gomes agrees that a chip embedded in the brain is far from a sci-fi fantasy. “Already people are beginning to experiment with handicapped people for manoeuvring their wheelchairs,” he says. “They are getting a few senses of direction with the wheelchair but getting from there to actual words is a long ways off. We have to do this in the brain a lot better to make that interaction possible. We have impatience for that to happen but the pieces of technology have to develop.”
ATLAS is 6 ft and 2 inces, it weighs 330 pounds. Its primary purpose is said to be joining in relief efforts particularly in those places where involvement of human beings is lethal or downright impossible. Boston Dynamics, who built the ATLAS body, say that the robot is strong and coordinated enough to climb using its hands and feet, as well as pick its way in congested spaces. The people who have been called in to work on the robot are tasked with programming it to interact in the most efficient way it can be made to. DARPA has released a video which shows ATLAS walking, avoiding obstacles, withstanding brute force applied at its torso and even climbing the stairs.
But what’s to stop the same indestructible robots that can walk over rubble, manipulate complex tools and enter burning buildings from being used in entirely different scenarios by the U.S. military? They might, for example, be able to march through debris-strewn war zones, manipulate weapons and hunt down terrorists, on a house-by-house basis. In other words, the DARPA Robotics Challenge could result in the creation of a real-life Terminator bot.
A team of researchers in Switzerland have developed a way of levitating and transporting small objects using nothing but sound.
Using ultrasonic waves – that is, sound waves whose frequency is too high for humans to hear – scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have made water droplets, instant coffee crystals, styrofoam flakes, and a toothpick, among other objects, hang in midair, move along a plane, and interact with each other. It is the first time that scientists have been able to use sound to simultaneously levitate several objects next to each other and move them around.
Here’s how it might work: First you pop through the skull and the brain’s dura (the membrane surrounding the brain), dipping into the brain’s neural sea itself, roughly two millimeters down, where you position thousands of low-powered CMOS chips (the “neural dust,” each as tiny as millionths of a meter) to begin capturing neural signals using electrodes and piezoelectric sensors, which convert the data to ultrasonic signals.
Those signals are then picked up by a sub-dural transceiver (sitting just above the “dust” chips and simultaneously powering them ultrasonically), which relays the data to an external transceiver resting just outside the skull (ASIC, memory, battery, long-range transmitter), which in turn communicates wirelessly with whatever computing device.
Like most futurist notions, this one hasn’t been tested yet — it’s just a formal proposal— but it’s another fascinating glimpse into where we might be headed, bypassing clumsy literal BMI head-jacks for micro-scale interfaces that would link us, wire-free, to future galaxies of virtual information.
In 1975:
1. You could buy an airline ticket and fly without ever showing an ID.
2. You could buy cough syrup without showing an ID.
3. You could buy and sell gold coins without showing an ID
4. You could buy a gun without showing an ID
5. You could pull as much cash out of your bank account without the bank filing a report with the government.
6. You could get a job without having to prove you were an American.
7. You could buy cigarettes without showing an ID
8. You could have a phone conversation without the government knowing who you called and who called you.
9. You could open a stock brokerage account without having to explain where the money came from.
10. You could open a Swiss bank account with ease. All Swiss banks were willing and happy to open accounts for Americans.
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