Is biometric ID the killer app for the smart watch?
The smart watch appeals to the tech early adopter. It’s “right”, but we’re not quite sure why. It’s worthless for reading anything beyond short messages, and while voice control is getting close in the technological sense, it’s not going to be socially acceptable for some time. Notifications is a compelling use case for many, but it’s doubtful that it’s the killer app for smart watches.
However another, more exciting possibility was hinted at with proximity based unlocking of devices — the idea of using the smart watch to digitize physical presence. Before we start implanting microchips into our bodies, watches are about as close to an “always-present” device as we’ll come. Where the watch is, chances are its owner is.
In itself, a device announcing the presence of a person would be valuable. Context sensitive environments, for instance, would be able to accurately identify the presence of a person in a room, providing much better lighting, heating, and security.
However, while this digital presence in the physical world is great by itself, once you add identification, it gets really exciting. By using the sensors ostensibly added for health to create a unique ID signature, you suddenly have digitized physical presence and secure identification. Now you have the basis for disrupting everything requiring secure ID.
Door locks can safely unlock when a device is detected, payment in stores can be done automatically or with the tap on the watch, even identifying yourself when travelling by air would be simpler by having the watch provide both presence and real-time biometric ID to surrounding systems. In effect, it lets people become nodes in the Internet of People & Things.
In a way, it might be good to think of “smart watches” as a kind of skeumorphism — a way to make a new technology seem familiar and easier to understand. Ultimately, they’re about as much a watch as the original skeumorphic notepad apps where physical notepads, but by adding this advanced technology to an item we already have and wear, people might embrace them. Unfortunately, this vision of the future can only happen if people start buying the watches, so to begin with, we may need to make it really great for notifications.
This was originally posted on the Viva Labs blog.
