In case you needed one more reason to jailbreak your iPhone, try this on for size: biometric facial recognition. Instead of unlocking your iPhone with a simple password (How boring is that?), you can use the iPhone 4’s front-facing camera to scan and recognize your face.
RecognizeMe is a new jailbreak app that helps make your iPhone safe from shady characters and potential homescreen peekers. By matching your face to a pre-defined database, RecognizeMe will unlock your iPhone and give you access to your device.
This new jailbreak app comes from the same developer that made the 3DBoard tweak. 3DBoard used similar technology to track the user’s head and give the illusion of a 3D environment on the iPhone’s springboard. RecognizeMe operates in a similar fashion.
Once installed, RecognizeMe needs to be “trained” to recognize your face. There are other settings to tweak, such as the “Verification Threshold.” When RecognizeMe can scan your face successfully, you can use the app to unlock your iPhone.
On your iPhone’s lock screen, you still have the option to enter a password manually to unlock. But with RecognizeMe, you can also tap a new icon and have your face scanned for verification. If access is not granted, you will be prompted to enter your password anyway, so don’t worry about getting locked out of your iPhone.
This app is an impressive technological feat for a mobile device, and it helps us get one step closer to the world of Minority Report.
RecognizeMe is expected to go live in Cydia at any moment. The app will be available for $6.99. We can’t wait to get our hands on this one.
What do you think? Does RecognizeMe sound useful to you? It seems like something to show off to your friends, and not a feature that would be useful on a daily basis.
