You Have to Look the Iribio Mouse in the Eye

Here's a first in the high-tech world. You take one ordinary mouse and the iris authentication technology and you get the "Super Mouse", which gives you ultimate protection against privacy violation.

Korean company Qritek recently announced the IRIBIO mouse, the first to embed the Iris Authentication engine board that operates independently from your personal PC. Although the idea of people looking very closely at their mice might seem absolutely hilarious, the fact that all the authentication processes happen inside the mouse and not in the PC grants you ultimate security.

Well, perhaps "ultimate" is too strong of a word; after all, there's no such thing as an 'unhackable' device, but this one comes pretty close.

In order to be able to process and store the data, the Iribio incorporates a 500Mhz processor, 16MB of SDRAM and 1MB of flash memory. Quite impressive for a mouse. I'm starting to feel ashamed with my rodent here being so dull and low-tech.

According to Qritek, the registration process is fairly fast, 4-10 seconds, and the recognition time is even lower, 1-2 seconds. Both of them imply getting the CMOS sensor to read the iris and processing the information.

The Korean also say that their algorithm is self-learning, which means that "Every time you recognize your iris, it observes if your iris image data is better than what you had registered. If the image captured for recognition is better, then then it will automatically update your data".

But authentication is not the main purpose of a mouse, so let's see the specifications normally encountered at a desktop rodent. The Iribio has a 600DPI optical resolution, 2 buttons, a scroll wheel with a push button and is compatible with the USB 1.1 interface or above.

Unfortunately, there's no word on the pricing or availability, so you'll have to contact Qritek yourself if you crave for this biometric mouse.

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