You certainly know this from your everyday life: to unlock your cell phone, you now use your face, you look briefly at your gadget and the system recognizes you. The same authentication procedure is used on some laptops - you look briefly at the camera and you're in and ready to work. 

The authentication procedures require a great deal of precision, but at the same time they must not devour a lot of energy, because you also know from your experience how quickly a battery can run down. This makes the so-called time-of-flight sensing technology, which makes such applications possible, all the more important. 

Low-power time-of-flight sensing technology from ams OSRAM enables host systems to measure distances accurately and at exceedingly high speed. Accurate distance measurements are used in various applications including presence detection, human facial recognition and advanced cameras.

To find out exactly how this all works and what other use cases are possible with time-of-flight, I invited my colleague David Smith, Senior Marketing Manager for direct Time of Flight Sensors to join us in the Photonstudio today. Dave, welcome!