Heartbeats will replace passwords

Our face, our voice, our fingers and our eyes are not the only elements that can be used to identify us with certainty. Researchers have created a biometric system that relies on digitizing a person's heart to determine its size, shape and rhythm. The goal ? Use this unique information as a biometric tool.

The demonstration was made by a team of researchers from the University of Buffalo, United States. The development of this system called Cardiac Scan took three years of work. Digitization detects the geometry, shape and size of a person's heart to identify it. "There are no two people with identical hearts," says Wenyao Xu, an assistant professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Buffalo. The shape of a heart does not change, except when people suffer from serious diseases, adds the researcher.
The digitization of the heart is done with a 2,4 GHz Doppler radar. The procedure only takes eight seconds, after which the identification is continuous. This means that as long as the person is using their computer or smartphone, the system recognizes it. Locking occurs automatically as soon as it moves away or someone else tries to connect.
This method has the advantage of being passive, contactless and completely transparent to the user who does not have to interact physically with a biometric reader or to remember passwords. Tested on 78 volunteers, Cardiac Scan achieved a 98% success rate with people positioned one meter away from the Doppler radar. Currently, the device can track a person up to 30 meters away, which would allow, for example, to use it in airports. As for the waves emitted by the system, Professor Xu ensures that the signal power is significantly lower than that of Wi-Fi and represents less than one percent of the radiation emitted by a smartphone.
The use of the heart as a biometric tool is not new. But so far, the work has focused on the signature of the heart rhythm, which has unique features. We already talked about cardiac identification, a biometric technology developed by a researcher at the Canadian University of Toronto that gave birth to the Nymi bracelet (read the article). The Cardiac Scan presents itself as an even simpler solution for the user, who must simply stand in front of the Doppler radar for a few seconds. But it is still necessary that researchers manage to miniaturize their device to integrate it into a mobile terminal or a computer. This will probably be the most difficult.

Pornography in virtual reality is a huge success
If virtual reality seems to have a lot of difficulty convincing the general public, it meets on the other hand a great success on a niche specific: pornography. Recent statistics, collected by VRPorn.com, a site specializing in virtual reality pornography, show a trend that RV websites are dominated by adult sites.

Thus, 60% of the sites offering virtual reality content are platforms offering content for adults. According to the infographic published by VRPorn.com, the three searches related to virtual reality on search engines are as follows:
- VR Porno
- VR Games
- VR Videos
We also learn that France is in the top 10 countries attending the site VRPorn.com, in eighth position. First place is American, followed by Germans and English. According to VRPorn.com, users prefer "first price" helmets to high quality helmets. Clearly, the "cardboard" helmets that can be found around 10 or 15 euros are often used to watch the content in virtual reality. HTC Vive or Oculus Rift them, are too expensive and require a much too expensive equipment (a PC powerful enough to turn them) and are therefore a minority. Pornhub, one of the first sites to offer recurring VR content for visitors, admitted that new videos were often able to reach 500,000 views per day. A real success.

The next goal of porn VR sites is to find a way to prevent users from using their hands to search for content or visit site categories. Nick Fast, technical director of the XHamster site says: "It is necessary to give more freedom to our visitors. We decided to focus on a hands-free feature to make navigation more fun. "Before we say" We still have efforts to make the content side to make quality and immersion more realistic. "