Time and again, we have seen Flash being extended in unique ways by leveraging the power of AS3. We caught something in the feeds yesterday that truly took us by surprise – face recognition using Flash.
By using the AS3 Marilena library Squidder built this unique application that can recognize faces via object recognition. I’d hazard a guess that this is a great first step for cheap biometric identification enabled through camera enabled devices using a browser.
Quite obviously, our first thoughts reach out to embedding such identification in assessments, where they’d do a great job of ensuring the right person took the assessment.
Another way such an application could be used is by integrating it as an authentication method in a LMS or other web-based services. So rather than requiring a username password, an individual’s face is all that’s needed to logon to a system.
While these are real world applications that we’ll no doubt see in the near future, in my mind what this points to is the emergence of Flash with AS3 as a platform that’s capable of a lot more than simple multimedia presentation and interactions. It’s now becoming a truly powerful platform capable of delivering rich, interactive and computing intensive experiences through the browser.
