Lumidigm announces Chinese amusement park fingerprint sensor deployments

Lumidigm has just announced that several Chinese amusement parks now authenticate attendees with the company’s multispectral fingerprint sensors.

Specifically, the company says the sensors are included in Galaxys Technologies stations at entertainment gates, ticket booths and member kiosks. At the Beijing children’s park Babyboss, parents’ fingerprints are matched against their child’s RFIPD wristband.

“Amusement parks exist, almost by definition, to create a positive atmosphere for customers looking for a fun get-away,” Phil Scarfo, Lumidigm Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Marketing said. “Authenticating these customers at the gate – collecting tickets – has to be as easy and trouble-free as possible or park operators risk spoiling the mood for their customers before the experience has even begun. And yet, parks have a financial interest in ensuring that only one person uses each ticket. To prevent ticket fraud, parks today can link each ticket to a specific customer with the touch of a finger. That’s why multispectral imaging fingerprint sensors are used today at many park gates to meet both requirements.”

Biometrics for amusement park access control is nothing new. Walt Disney World has been using biometric scanners to grant access to the park for quite some time. Initially, fingerprint geometry scanners were introduced to verify ticket holders, but they have since been upgraded to fingerprint sensors. Recently, the park introduced an RFID system to go along with its existing access control gates.

Children and biometrics are a tenuous combination at best, and many recent objectives combining the two have been hotly contested, though there have been some successful applications. BiometricUpdate.com has looked at the success and failure of some of these programs, through the lens of school cafeterias. Read the full feature here. 

A recent Biometric Research Note suggests that fingerprint technology is the most established and widespread form of biometrics, and will dominate the residential and commercial security product marketplace. The Biometric Research Group projects that fingerprint technology will represent US$3 billion of revenue within the residential and commercial security product marketplace by 2017.

Recently, Lumidigm announced that its V-series multispectral fingerprint sensors have also been deployed across the Baltimore/Washington International airport for tarmac access control.

Article Topics

access control  |  fingerprint  |  Lumidigm