Dubai airport’s new virtual aquarium tunnel scans your face as you walk through it
Dubai International Airport is doing away with security counters next year and introducing virtual fish to verify your identity instead. Yes, you read that right.
Instead of waiting in line for security kiosks or e-gates, passengers will be able to walk through a virtual aquarium tunnel in which 80 in-built cameras will scan their faces. The role of the fish? To capture the passengers’ attention – and thus their biometrics.
The first “biometric borders” will appear by late 2018 at Dubai International Airport’s Terminal 3, with other terminals being fitted with them by 2020.
The screens can be changed from “aquarium mode” to show other themed scenes, or even adverts.
It’s the airport’s latest measure aimed at speeding up the security process to cope with an ever-increasing influx of travellers.
Maj Gen Al Hameeri says that it has already managed to cut down time spent at the security counters to a mere five seconds, but that’s not enough.
Dubai is the world’s busiest airport in terms of international passenger traffic, with more than 80 million travellers passing through it last year. According to the General Civil Aviation, that number is expected to reach 124 million by 2020.
It’s not the only major travel hub to be experimenting with this sort of technology.
Australia also has plans to test a similar “contactless” passport control system that checks arrivals against electronic versions of passports and biometric cues. It would let passengers “literally just walk out like at a domestic airport” and will start working in March 2019, according to reports.
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