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Luxand Blink now lets you use your face to log in to 64-bit Windows 7, too
Luxand Blink's claim to fame is its ability to log you onto Windows using face recognition with no password required. It's one of the only free applications that does this, and the concept sounds quite neat (at least on paper).
While I covered it before, I was unable to test Blink at the time because it simply didn't work on my 64-bit Windows 7 installation. Luxand has recently released a 64-bit version, though, so I grabbed it about a week ago and have been using it since. I'm back with the results now, and in a word, it's impressive!
Blink took about one minute to set up and register my face; the instructions tell you to "look at the monitor," but my webcam isn't on the monitor (I'm using a PC). I just stared right into my webcam and turned my face slowly left and right for about 30 seconds, and that was it.
When I next logged on, a little "viewport" appeared above the regular user button on my monitor. Then, when I stared into the webcam, Luxand recognized me in about five seconds and logged me on.
As I said, I've been using it for about a week now, and it's a fun little app. It's not faster than typing your password (unless you have a super-long password), but it's definitely easier, and when I get up in the morning, all bleary-eyed, and plop myself in front of the computer, "easier" counts.
One caveat: I would not be surprised to learn that Luxand can be easily fooled with a good-quality print of your mug (this is the case with most face recognition software, I believe). So, you might want to think twice before using it for any of those top-secret, military-grade machines that you've got running in the basement.
[Thanks, adya.22.13!]
Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsJrdnram98Aug 3rd 2010 7:58AM
Listen, don't use this app! When I tried to use it on my net book, it didn't even show my login screen so I couldn't log in. So I had to enter safe mode and uninstall it since it does not lode in safe mode. Don't use this application.
Muffin_manAug 4th 2010 9:08AM
Hahaha the fact that you went into safe mode to uninstall it and get back onto your computer is pretty funny.
Now if I ever feel like snooping on someone's computer who has this then all I have to do is uninstall it. xD
adya.22.13Aug 3rd 2010 1:43PM
We are very sorry that you had such inconvenience using Luxand Blink. This bug can not cause any data loss and we hear of it very seldom. We've heard of such issue before only several times (usually some rare hardware configurations) and we will appreciate if you could specify which hardware you used and give us a feedback. Any application or even operating system has its own bugs and we are glad that you've helped us to spot one in our Blink.
If any other user of Blink will face any problems or if software will work not as it is expected, please write an e-mail with most detailed description of what happened on support@luxand.com. Please make sure that word "Blink" is in a topic of e-mail.
Vlad Shchiptsov
Luxand Inc.
DeoWulfAug 3rd 2010 11:56AM
I own an Asus laptop and have used a similar app which comes with it for a while. Although I had the maximum number of pictures stored in the database, it would never reliably log me on. Especially when I was showing it off to other people '-.- I think I'll stick to password for now.
ProlornAug 3rd 2010 11:52PM
My Dell laptop came with a similar app, from FastAccess. It was interesting, and seemed fairly reliable in my tests, but I didn't bother to reinstall it when I upgraded to 7 and wiped the drive.
darwinsurvivorAug 4th 2010 3:30AM
I can't wait until people with their photos as login icons start installing this. Then you'll only need a mirror (or cell phone camera) to get into their machine :P