A lire sur: http://www.atelier.net/en/trends/articles/fiberio-touchscreen-identifies-users-their-fingerprints_423110
Being able to read digital fingerprints
on screens used by various different people could bring significant
advances for collaborative working.
Having to enter a user name and password has
up to now been seen as the final remaining security hurdle to accessing
touchscreens in public places such as hospitals, bars and classrooms.
However it is still often difficult to know exactly who has been using
which device to do what and when. Christian Holz and Patrick Baudisch, two researchers at the Hasso Plattner Institute at Potsdam in Germany, have been working on the problem and have now developed Fiberio,
a smart table equipped with a touchscreen, which is able to identify a
number of different users by their fingerprints each time they interact
with the system.
Solving a long-standing problem
How to make a screen which is able to project light to
capture an image while at the same time reflecting it in order to
generate a scan of a fingerprint is a conundrum which specialists in the
field of man-machine interaction have been trying for a long time to
solve. Previous smart tables with touchscreens have had to integrate a
projector, infrared light and camera embedded beneath their plastic
screens. The Fiberio table improves on this approach by using an optic
fibre plate three millimetres thick. The extremities of these fibres are
extremely reflective and allow part of the infrared light to reflect
towards the camera. Then, when the light arrives at the surface of a
finger it generates less reflection, creating darker zones. This
generates sufficient contrast to pick out and identify the ridges and
valleys of the person’s finger and thus provides a reliable fingerprint.
A wide range of uses
“Being able to keep track of what has been done and by whom
on a given device opens up a wide range of new applications in
collaborative interactive systems,” underlines Holz. Using such a system
in a hospital, for example, could provide patients with the option of
looking at their medical files, would allow doctors to make changes to
these files, and nurses to request the appropriate medicine, etc. In an
educational context, each individual student’s progress could be
recorded and assessed in cases where a teacher would struggle to spot
individual contributions to work done on a computer used by many
different people. Bank customers standing at an ATM could simply touch
the screen to identify themselves for the purpose of withdrawing money.
Holz and his colleagues have been looking to widen Fiberio’s fields of
application, and are currently working on adapting this technology to
mainstream mobile devices, as at the moment the system only works on
smart tables.
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