The e-tailing giant's engineers are quietly testing scanners that can identify an individual human hand as a way to ring up a store purchase, with the goal of rolling them out at its Whole Foods supermarket chain in the coming months, The Post has learned.
Employees at Amazon's New York offices are serving as guinea pigs for the biometric technology, using it at a handful of vending1 machines to buy such items as sodas2, chips, granola bars and phone chargers, according to sources briefed on the plans.
The high-tech3 sensors4 are different from fingerprint5 scanners found on devices like the iPhone and don't require users to physically6 touch their hands to the scanning surface.
Instead, they use computer vision and depth geometry to process and identify the shape and size of each hand they scan before charging a credit card on file.
The system, code-named "Orville," will allow customers with Amazon Prime accounts to scan their hands at the store and link them to their credit or debit7 card.