Thanks to the efforts of Apple and Samsung, biometric scanners are becoming much more common in our smartphones. These tend to come in the form of fingerprint scanners are generally used for security purposes, but a team of researchers over at Yahoo has developed a new type of biometric scanning that could power the next generation of scanner-equipped smartphones.
We should all be familiar with biometric scanners in smartphones by now. While sometimes it can ultimately work against us, biometric recognition is making its way into the mainstream, offering an easy way to gain access to our mobile devices. So far, we’ve only really seen fingerprint recognition as the main form of biometric security on today’s smartphones, but that may change sometime (relatively) soon. A team of researchers from Yahoo Labs have created a new technology called ‘Bodyprint’ that turns your smartphone’s touchscreen display into a biometric scanner. Since mobile devices’ touchscreens have lower input resolutions compared to those found in the iPhone 6 or Galaxy S6’s home buttons, Bodyprint requires you to scan a different part of your body, whether that be your ear, fist, five fingers or palm.