Fingerprint sensors have become common on modern smartphones, even midrange devices are starting to ship with them. The hardware has gotten much better than it was just a few years ago when Samsung used those atrocious swipe-style sensors.
Capacitive sensors use physical contact with your skin to generate a high-resolution map of your fingerprint. Qualcomm’s new Sense ID tech is doing something similar with sound. According to Qualcomm, Sense ID sonic technology has enough resolution to detect the location of ridges and even sweat pores to build a 3D map of your finger. That data can be matched against previously registered fingerprints to grant access to a device.
The important innovation here is that Sense ID doesn’t rely on capacitance — that is, you don’t have you physically touch the sensor. It would work through a wide variety of materials like glass, aluminum, and sapphire. That means the sensor could be inside a phone or tablet without an external component. We might finally be able to put the fingerprint reader behind the touchscreen, which makes a ton more sense than touching a specific spot on the case to unlock a device. There have been joke apps that fake fingerprint reading on the screen for years, so clearly people think this is a cool idea in the abstract.
Qualcomm also claims Sense ID is more secure than a traditional fingerprint scanner. Many current scanners can be fooled if you have a stolen imprint of someone’s fingerprint. This would apparently not be possible with Sense ID; it can tell the difference between a copy and a real finger, because the ultrasonic waves actually penetrate several layers of skin.
Sense ID will debut in the LeTV Le Max Pro, which is the first device to pack a Snapdragon 820 SoC. LeTV is a Chinese OEM that’s scarcely known outside of Asia. This phone has a big 6.33-inch screen and a fingerprint sensor window on the back. So, at least in this case, it’s not using the more sci-fi capabilities of Sense ID.
Most flagship phones in 2016 are expected to run Qualcomm chips, so there’s a chance we’ll see more Sense ID implementations. Android has full support for fingerprint sensors as of v6.0, so OEMs no longer have to roll their own code to make this feature work. That should encourage adoption of technologies like Sense ID.
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