By Marc Lostracco

Nerd alert! A Toronto company made biometrics news this week when they announced a new camera that not only functions as a plain, ol’ webcam, but also scans your face in three dimensions. Headquartered in Markham, Bioscrypt has been known for devices like fingerprint authenticators and smartcard readers, and they feel that facial scanning is a friendlier (and more sanitary) alternative to finger or iris scans.
Plotting 40,000 identification points on your mug with infrared beams, but concentrating on your forehead, eye sockets and the bridge of your nose, the system will allegedly still recognize you if you shaved off your beard or if you’ve got an identical twin. Anyone undergoing plastic surgery would need to be re-registered for security applications.
Though the technology will likely be used first in the business sector, it is expected to reach the consumer market by the end of the year, just as fingerprint scanners entered the mainstream for personal use. The 3-D scanning could help gamers create avatars or be used instead of passwords for personal computers, as demonstrated in this video from CNET. We just like it because it reminds us of a bunch of classic sci-fi flicks.