Companies have been dangling the promise of hyper-connected smart environments in front of us for years. We’ve been told that soon we’ll be able to walk into a room, and our devices will instantly cater to our preferences. In this world, Spotify has learned that you enjoy listening to hip hop while making dinner, and your Jambox knows how loud you like the volume. Upon entering your kitchen, the lights dim to a warm glow, just the way you like it, and based on what you’ve indicated you’re making for dinner via a cooking app, the oven presets to 400 degrees with just a wave of your hand.
Sounds pretty great, right? But the problem is, how do these devices even know who’s there? Tailoring environments to our desires is reliant on devices knowing and understanding the people who use them. But short of manually programming your preferences, there’s no easy way for our gadgets and apps to know who we are or what we like. “We see ourselves as sort of the central point in enabling that in a really simple way,” says Karl Martin, CEO of Bionym, a biometrics company based in Toronto.
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