RecognizeMe
Latest
Biometric face recognition for jailbroken iPhones with RecognizeMe
Have you ever wished your iPhone 4 would recognize your face and let you past the lock screen? RecognizeMe, a facial recognition lock screen tweak for the jailbroken iPhone 4, does just that. Simply hit the RecognizeMe button on the lock screen and let the phone scan your face using the front facing camera. The app can be trained to recognize your ugly mug, while the threshold for a match is adjustable. If RecognizeMe confirms your identity, it'll unlock your iPhone. If a match isn't found, it'll prompt you to enter your password, so at least you can't be locked out of your phone if you haven't shaved this morning or (gasp!) this month. There are drawbacks to RecognizeMe, however. One is that it takes time to scan your face -- long enough that it would have been quicker to enter in your PIN or password manually. Secondly, it should also work off a 2D image, which means anyone with a photo of you can trick it into unlocking your iPhone. Still, it's a novelty that could be useful, and it's certainly something we'll want to see more of going forward. RecognizeMe will be available for purchase in the Cydia store soon (it wasn't available at the time of writing) for a launch price of US$6.99. Read on for a video of the app in action. [via Redmond Pie] Cheers Jeff
RecognizeMe unlocks your jailbroken iPhone using your face, anyone else's (video)
We don't often jailbreak our iPhones to test apps, but a facial recognition unlock tool seemed a worthy excuse, so we gave it a shot. RecognizeMe uses the front-facing camera in your iPhone 4 (and iPad 2, eventually) to unlock the phone for its owner. Unfortunately, it also unlocked the device for Brian Heater (center), our resident 900 number enthusiast, and Bianca Bosker, Huff Po's tech editor and our only other friend in the newsroom. The app includes a setting for verification threshold, so we played around with that, trying a dozen times to get the app to ignore Brian, but even at 80 percent it was recognizing both of us (65 percent was the cutoff for Bianca). Bumping the threshold up to 100 percent finally locked Brian out, but at that level, the device wouldn't unlock for anyone, making it totally secure -- and totally busted. Verification took a full 25 seconds to timeout (compared to 5-15 seconds to grant access at lower levels, depending on lighting conditions), so using this app requires p-a-t-i-e-n-c-e. At this point, RecognizeMe is a $7 gimmick that might impress your grandmother (assuming she doesn't ask to try it herself), but if you need to keep your device under lock and key, a tried-and-true passcode is still the way to go.
