Ultimate secure ID card of the future
Hi! I’m Sumeet Jain, I am a Chemical Engineer at GE Global Research and I lead a multidisciplinary team working on a new class of thermo-plastic based volume holographic materials for Secure Cards & IDs like Driver’s licenses and passports, Credit cards and Employee badges. This technology is being developed as a shared vision program between GE Global Research and SABIC Innovative Plastics. The unique attribute of the GE-SABIC IP holographic material is that it can be processed like a conventional plastic and the holograms are recorded within the holographic material. The holographic materials can be laminated within the card itself, making it virtually impossible for a card to be altered.
A big focus of our developmental efforts is to demonstrate various types of image holograms that can be recorded in these materials. We can store binary images, 3-D images of a person’s face, fingerprints and even create unique animations within our holographic plastic materials. Although such capability is very important for application development I also think that the resulting pictures & videos are very cool. I wanted to share some of them with you here.
In this video, you see a 3-D image of a person’s face recorded as a hologram in GE-SABIC IP holographic materials. Facial images were captured from different angular perspectives and recorded in the same volume of the material. As you rotate the sample (as seen in the video), a rotating 3-D facial image is generated, which is not only cool but also provides robust security. Sometime in the near future, we can carry a card with a secure holographic 3-D facial image recorded inside the volume of the card that provides a true step change in the level of security, making it virtually impossible to steal a person’s identity or tamper with their cards in any way. To me, that’s cool!
Stay tuned for more news on the progress on this technology!
Read the story that Engadget posted.
Read the story that was in the Albany Times Union.
Hi Sumeet,
This is great technology and you presented it well recently in Budapest at HoloPackHoloPrint 09. Can’t wait to see this commercialized. I wonder if the first commercial application will be for security or decorative. Both are potentially very large markets.
Glenn