You Might Soon Be Able to Unlock Your Android Device By Smiling or Winking!

When Google launched ICS 2 years back, they introduced a new way to unlock your Android device. You just had to hold the device and look at the front camera and the device would automatically unlock upon recognizing your face. This featured proved disastrous at times since users with face similar to yours were also able to unlock your device. Google has gone a step ahead & has patented two new phone unlocking technologies using facial recognition which once brought into Android will allow users to unlock their devices by winking or by smiling or by doing both simultaneously.

You’d just have to look into your device’s front camera and wink or smile or both. Android will then match your smile with the one stored on your device (the one which you recorded while setting up the phone lock). If the smile matches, the phone would unlock. You’d also be able to unlock your smartphone by following a set of facial expressions. For example you could wink, raise your eyebrow, frown or laugh!

The camera will capture your expression, match it with the image stored on your device, compare both of them and if the images match the device would unlock!

Though the feature is innovative, I believe many would still prefer the traditional unlock-by-pin method to unlock their Android devices. Even after having the face unlock feature on my Samsung Galaxy S3, I prefer using unlock by pattern or pin rather because it’s more comfortable to use. You can’t use the face recognition unlock feature in low-light and many times the device simply doesn’t recognize you because you just changed your hair-style!

Which method to unlock your device would you prefer? Unlock by facial expressions or the traditional unlock by pin or password? I’d prefer one of the latter methods!

If you are interesting in knowing more about this technology and it’s working, you can check the patent here. You might need some technical reading ability to understand the patent entirely.

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