AFCEA/ USNI West 2009 Convention

I spent the day down at the San Diego Convention Center and attended the U.S. Naval Institutes WEST 2009 session. It tuned out to be pretty interesting. Lots of defense contractors and computer systems, it also had unmanned air vehicles (UAV), unmanned submersible vehicles (USV) and even an unmanned machine gun on treads.

The most interesting thing was something called IRIS by Sarnoff Industries.



It scans the colored portion of your eye or iris using near infrared light. It can penetrate glasses, sunglasses and works from as far away as ten feet. The person doesn't even need to be looking directly at the scanner and they can process up to 30 people per minute, just walking through a metal detector like walkway.

They say every one's iris is uniquely different and cannot be altered. So each eye scan is like a fingerprint or snowflake and can ID a person. It could change the way we go through border checkpoints, airport security or even use credit cards.

The downside is that each scanning unit currently costs $20,000. The credit card companies and ATMs, who could benefit the most by eliminating ID theft and fraud, say that it costs less for their losses than it would to outfit ATMs or credit card swipers with the IRIS scanning technology.

So although it's too expensive to implement right now I think it's in our future.