By David Ponce
The IRIBIO iris scanning mouse, from Korean outfit Qritek, does one thing (aside from its mousey duties): it scans your iris to make sure you’re allowed to be using the PC its attached to. But it does this one thing in the most absurd, mind-bogglingly strange way: it requires you to hold the mouse right up to your eye to perform the scan. So, picture a cubicle farm of office workers coming in from lunch, all holding their mice up to one eye, and you can appreciate just how awesome an implementation of biometric security this is. Of course, if you’re going to be giving your mouse an iris scanner, that really is just about the only way it can be done.
Design comedy aside, the mouse does seem rather useful, as it packs its very own 500 MHz processor with 16 MB of RAM and one meg of flash memory. This way the mouse itself handles all the processing and data storage (if you have multiple authorized users, for instance). It is wired though, and has a resolution of only 600 dpi, but at least this connection is an encrypted USB one. No word on price, unless a helpful Korean reader can enlighten us by looking around the product page.
[ Product Page (Korean) ] VIA [ Everything USB ]
They say “Export, gov’t and companies only blah blah” so no word on price.