Mobile payment began with smartphones followed by smartwatch and similar wearable bands. Recently there has been a new add-on to the family of mobile payment wearables: Sunglasses. Now apart from using cell phones and smartwatches, user can use their glasses to make payment.
This initiative known as WaveShades is a new contactless payment system built into sunglasses, born from a partnership between Australian startup Inamo, sunglasses-maker Local Supply and Visa. The prototype is rolled out ahead of St. Jerome’s Laneway Music Festival and handed out to goers to make their contactless payment.
I feel the idea here is to present a use case where user (specially millennials who frequently attend such festivals) only need to worry about keeping track of one thing, which is almost always right in front of their eyes.
The payment procedure is similar to other wearables, where there is a NFC chip in one arm of the glasses. The user just need to wave his glasses in front of terminal to make the payment.
The ever growing mobile payment family continues to see new innovations like these more frequently than ever. This definitely opens up the possibility of contactless payment being a dominant industry of its own in payment segment making traditional payment methods obsolete in near future.
references: http://www.geek.com/tech/get-smart-with-waveshades-tap-to-pay-sunglasses-1687654/
https://www.cnet.com/news/waveshades-contactless-payment-sunglasses-laneway/
I find it very interesting how contactless payments are expanding to everyday items. I understand how it would be useful to have mobile payments, since people tend to always have their phones on them, however I believe it’s a little too much to have payment abilities on sunglasses. Sunglasses are not worn very often, compared to regular eyeglasses which would be more useful. They could also be lost or stolen easily, and provide very little security.
This is a very interesting device. I have no doubts about the possibility that contactless payment will become a dominant player in payment industry. However, I’m concerned about its security too because if such technology already exists, it’s likely that hackers can take advantage of that to contactlessly crawl data or make fraud payments.
This is absolutely an interesting device. I have no doubt about the possibility that contactless payment will become a dominant method in payment industry. However, I’m concerned that if such technology already exists, it’s likely that hackers can take advantage of that to contactlessly crawl data or make fraud payments.