Since the inception of the Coronavirus-led pandemic, we have seen a huge increase in the adoption rate of contactless, well, sort of everything, from your payments to food delivery. Moreover, major companies such as Amazon are working on other advanced contactless technologies that let customers use their palm as their IDs. Now, a designer from France has developed a new ring that lets users perform several contactless tasks using near-field communication (NFC).
One Ring to Rule Them All…
Dubbed as the Aeklys, this smart ring enables the user to make seamless contactless payments in places where there are NFC payment systems. So, this means that the Aeklys smart ring can store all your credit and debit card information for you to make contactless payments without using any of your biometric data. That is pretty cool, considering the security risk of personal data in today’s digital world.
Apart from storing all your card info, this potentially-revolutionary piece of technology can also unlock your car (if you have a digital car-key) or your house (if you have NFC-enabled smart lock systems). So, basically, whatever supports NFC will work the “Aeklys” ring seamlessly.
Now, the contactless-payment-enabling-smart-ring is designed by a French designer named Philippe Starck and developed by tech startup, iCare Technologies, from the French region of Corsica.
According to the developers, the Aeklys will enable just five contactless functions at launch. These include the following:
- Bank payments
- Public transport.
- Digital business card.
- Computer ID.
- Private concierge service
However, both, Starck and iCare say that they will add a bunch of new functionality to the ring in the near future. The developer and the designer of the ring want you to use the ring as a key part of your digital ecosystem and state that the ring “connects you to your environment like magic.”
So, if both Starck and iCare keep pushing their limits for the development of this ring, the Aeklys might become an all-in-one ID device for users around the world. And that is the aim with which the developers are continuing to improve the smart ring.
You can check out the Aeklys ring on iCare’s official website and it comes for $300 (~Rs. 22,032) per piece.
