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UCSD Biometric Vending Machine
dice writes to tell us that grad students at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are creating the first biometric vending machine. The current machine comes equipped with a barcode scanner, a fingerprint reader, and a web cam for facial recognition. One student dubbed it the "most over-designed soda machine in the world." The project, code-named "SodaVision," is the brainchild of associate professor Stefan Savage, but it was the students who really made it come to life. And yes, it runs Linux.
People sure have a lot of time on their hands!
My ZooLoo
Let me be the first to say, I'd be afraid to vote on that thing. Especially libertarian..
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
Lucky students are notoriously honest.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
were killed to bring us this device.
Seems really pointless when you think of vending machines that sell soft drinks and snacks, but I guess there could be a use for more-secure vending machines for higher-dollar items (like the one selling iPods I saw a month or two back).
When I read the summary I thought, "Hey this sounds pretty useless, but maybe I just missed something." Then I read the article, and I'm still thinking, "Hey this sounds pretty useless."
Open the pop bay door now...
This project is nothing! Linux on a soda machine? I've had NetBSD running on my toaster for years ;)
Not only is the article slashdotted, so is their site, http://sodavision.com/. The latter has a few more details.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
Now the black and white hats in the computer science department will now have a new toy to fight over. Whoever gets the most freebies wins!
Never flip off a vending machine. They carry one hell of a grudge.
sorry but paying by fingerprint is a little to scary for me. it's another way for big brother to watch you.
Hello! Thank you for using soda vision! You have ingested: 250 grams of sugar today, 1,800 grams of sugar this week, and 7,212 grams this month for a grand total of 15.9 lbs! Congratulations, you are a candidate for TYPE A Diabetes!
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
They say here that they used a webcam to do the facial recognition.
I haven't RTFA yet so I'm not sure which brand or model they use, but would the average webcam provide a high enough resolution to do effective facial recognition?
Would it be possible to write a simple hack that uses the built in camera on a macbook to do the same kind of thing?
Any facial recognitiion experts out there care to weigh in?
Look out honey cause I'm usin' technology
Ain't got time to make no apologies
Combining biometrics makes identification less accurate. Using both face recognition and a finger print scan would be less accurate than using either alone. For a source, see John Daugman's webpage. He is the one who invented the algorithm that modern iris scanners use.
Anyway, methinks some investors are being taken for a ride here.
Medical use comes to mind as there are already "vending machines" networked to reduce prescription drug screw ups in hospitals as well as a way account for who took what drugs from inventory and for what patient.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
> And yes, it runs Linux.
Fortunately they haven't been able to find a driver for the anal probe.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Seriously, I suppose usefulness is in the eye of the beholder, but from my rather pragmatic standpoint the machine has one very important use: it allows me to get a coke with very little effort (while differentiating my debts from those of others). There's really nothing more to it that that. I think people are looking for something deep, or new a new product category, or some groundbreaking science... move on... you won't find it here.
This project really had two goals: make it easy to buy soft drinks from our grad student co-op and have fun building a real artifact.
The latter part -- having fun -- is underappreciated. Really, the students had a great time putting the pieces together... they had to design and build an interface board to Vendo's control bus, they had to build a UI (that student was a ST:TNG fan so the interface mimics the screens from the series), they had to interface it to our MySql database that holds user accounts, etc. It was a real esprit de coeur project and one in which everyone had alot of fun. Once it was working, people started adding other components: a 2d bar code scanner (not used for soda, contrary to the article, but for candy and other goods), they added visual recognition (and there is a banana detector in the works to register purchase of bananas), there is a voice synthesizer that can say "Shame" out loud if your cash balance in the co-op goes negative, there is even a student who has been talking about door-to-door delivery using a robot, etc.
I suspect if we had called it a "case mod", people would have had understood the spirit in which it was built.
Yeah, here's the linux machine
.... ....
Bob: I want a soda
Machine:
Bob: Hello?!? I want a soda!
Machine:
Passerby: Dude, there's no decent voice recognition software for this machine yet.
Bob: Fine, I'll just put in money.
*Bob puts in dollar*
Bob: WTF?! It took my dollar, why doesn't it show my credit?
Passerby: There are no drivers for the bill counter yet. Oh, and don't bother with coins either. They haven't released those drivers either.
Bob: Well how the fuck am I supposed to get my soda?
Passerby: Well, write some drivers. Everyone should just write their own. What are you, lazy?
umm... the CS dept created it. no test subjects.
man, I feel like mold.
Talks to Diebold machines on voting days to comply with State laws. Switches you to light beer after the first six.
Cuts you off after a few too many, to keep underage students from cutting off older, sleeping roommates' fingers.
And it allows the diet police to KEEP you from GETTING that Pepsi that you so desperately want, too!
This thing has the capability of monitoring WHO is using it, WHAT they are buying, and, with very little hassle on the server end, running a database of "healthy/NOT healthy" purchases and locking a user out who has too many "Not Healthy" buys on his or her record. Given the move towards lack of choice in school lunches - how long will it be before companies and even grogery stores start using this technology to remove even MORE freedom of choice from the American consumer?
Every bright side has a dark one and I have the feeling that I just nailed down where the dark side of THIS force happens to be.
Therefore, I christen this vending machine: "DARTH VENDER!"
Lee Darrow, C.H.
Chicago, IL
Heya Stefan,
I (Bill Kerney) was a grad student in CS at UCSD until '01 or '02 or so under Scott Baden.
For those who don't know, the Chez Bob computer was the most overengineered ledger in the history of ledgers. Every year some student would hack it to do something new and unusual. When I was there, they:
1) Added passwords (which were not really needed since the fridge door wasn't locked or anything if you wanted to steal something)
2) Added text to speech.
3) Added a saying it could say whenever you logged in. I enjoyed making up random latin phrases, which it would read in its stately mechanical voice.
4) Added a barcode reader.
5) Barcode reader was integrated into text to speech. "BOUGHT. ONE. TIGERS. MILK." Awesome.
And I think it also did stock alerts, sending an email to the Chez Bob Coordinator Alan Su when they were running low on something. Since we had a few people in the department who did Battlebots at the time, there were some people working on building a delivery robot that would pull the item out of the fridge, drive down the corridor and deliver the item. I think the main stumbling block was that they couldn't figure out how to open the doors (which had passcodes, and I think were difficult to open anyway for a robot).
For those who don't know Stefen Savage, check the archives on Slashdot, going back at least to '98 or so when he published his doctoral thesis (IIRC) on tracking DDOS attacks by looking at spurious ACKs coming into an unused block of IP space. He's had a lot of interesting ideas that Slashdot has covered. If my memory hasn't gone fuzzy, he also tought a computer gaming class at UCSD (which I enjoyed helping my friend (Scott O'Neil) with as I'd worked in the gaming industry for a couple years).