Let me start by repeating “Windows Hello Rocks!!!”.
For those of you who don’t quite now what this is, one of the new features of Windows 10 is to get rid of passwords, and use biometric sensors to recognize who you are.
Biometric sensors being fingerprint readers, Iris retina scanners, and of course Depth cameras such as the Intel RealSense F200. The Intel depth camera is eerily similar to the Kinect for Windows cameras: v1 and v2, so hopefully those with Kinects, can use this feature too in the near feature. I know some of you may be asking what’s the big deal… Fingerprint readers have been around for 15 years or more. I know I use to have one when I worked for the Air Force Reserves as a Crystal Reports developer.
Well, the big news is now you can use embedded cameras like the Intel RealSense F200 to simply have your face recognized securely so you don’t need your finger anymore!!!
But I digress, currently the Kinect is not supported so I ask why?
My only guess why is because doing this requires changes in the driver architecture. The current driver is designed to be run in User mode setting. User mode loads “AFTER” a user is logged in, so using the Kinect would require creating a driver which runs in Kernel mode – which runs before the user is logged in, thus allowing this device to run outside the realm of the user mode setting and be used for Facial recognition.
Well I just got my Intel RealSense Development Kit in the mail. It contains the F200 camera along with SDK and drivers for windows 8.1 and windows 10.
I installed the drivers and SDK on both my win8.1 machine, along with my surface pro 3 which has Windows 10 build 10240, and I attached the device. Windows recognized it perfectly. I followed the steps here.
Once complete Windows hello was working and “Look Ma, no hands” no more passwords. Windows 10 recognized my face and only my face. I can sign in by just getting in front of the camera.
Great work Microsoft!!!
D Goins Insperience 