14 DAY TRIAL // Car thieves make off with thousands of cars each year, so Associate Professor Shigeomi Koshimizu at the Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology in Tokyo decided to do something about it.
Alas, he is not a fighting man, nor an investigator or a cop, so he can't personally put a stop to such felonies.
Thus, he settled for the next best thing, namely inventing a special car chair that can recognize the behind of its owner.
By generating a web of 39 indices, a subject's rear end can be mapped and recorded for future comparison with whoever decides it is a good idea to sit in the driver's seat.
There is just a 2.2 percent chance of the chair failing to recognize the print and just 1.1% of letting someone drive away with the car illicitly.
Professor Shigeomi Koshimizu thinks his technology could be particularly useful because of its lack of dependence on light (unlike facial recognition) or the cleanliness of sensors (fingerprint sensors).
He also says offices, among other venues, could use them, for automatically logging on users to the PC as soon as they sit down.