You remember those old-time spy movies where someone fairly important would walk to a retina scanner and hunch over, while light would shine into their eye, identifying them. I always found that technology fascinating, but impractical. Not only was it an incentive to have people rip your eyeballs out, the procedure seemed just a little too complicated. Turns out, AliPay (a subsidiary of Chinese giant Alibaba) has a solution – and it just involves scanning your palm.
Palm recognition has been around for a decent amount of time (we actually wrote about a that uses the tech too), but AliPay’s PL1 gives it mass adoption. Designed to facilitate payments, the PL1 lets you hold your palm up against a sensor to approve transactions, letting you make payments without making contact with POS terminals and their potentially germ-ridden keypads.
Designer: Alipay (Hangzhou) Information Technology Co., Ltd
The way it works is simple, the PL1 recognizes palm prints as well as palm vein biometrics or the shape of the network of veins underneath your skin (which are absolutely impossible to fake). The technology is implemented in a POS terminal that authenticates your approval with a palm scan rather than a fingerprint, a PIN code, or an OTP. Just hold your palm over the sensor (some may call it a ‘Roman salute’), and the sensor does the rest in seconds.
The technology holds promise for multiple reasons. Apart from being absolutely infallible and impossible to trick (you can’t counterfeit a palm with vein structures, can you?) it’s also fast, and contact-free, making it perfect for most societies, except for probably places where you’re wearing gloves, whether because of the cold or because of safety.
The PL1’s application isn’t limited to payments either, AliPay says it can be used for authentication, access, and even be deployed in large numbers at terminals in public transport like subways or buses, enabling contact-free and secure modes of access and payment in a society largely relying on fingerprints that are easy to fake, and facial recognition that has a pretty large error rate.
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