Vision-Box: A smooth, hassle-free Travel Experience

You plan to go home for the holiday season but you’re daunted by the prospect of an airport jam-packed with travelers going through security checks. If only there was a way to skip the hour-long lines at immigration counters and head on to board the plane, take your seat, and relax. But if manual security checks aren’t in place, how can safety be assured? Biometrics is the key to solving this dilemma. An individual’s unique attributes such as facial structure, fingerprints, irises or even gait can be used for identification if those details exist on a database. Airports in countries like China, Japan, India, Singapore, and the UK have started investing heavily in biometric security checks. SITA, an aviation technology company, states that 71% of airlines plan to invest heavily in biometric identification in the next three years.

The advancement of biometrics in aviation has always been a steady trot forward, but with Vision-Box entering the industry, the pace has picked up substantially. With its headquarters in Lisbon, Portugal, Vision-Box is a multi-national company that aims to improve the convenience and efficiency of security in government agencies and border control by implementing unique biometric management solutions. By creating a seamless experience for the traveler in a paperless, contact-free manner, Vision-Box has revolutionized security and traveler interaction in a single stroke. As a result, Vision- Box has become the leading partner for biometric security in airports across the US, Europe, China, India, South East Asia, and Japan.

After the success of Aruba Happy flow, the first-ever self-service solution based on biometrics, Vision-Box has developed Seamless Flow. It is a journey in which the passenger can move freely across the airport without having to worry about wasting time in queues or security checks, all done hands-free using the power of biometric management.

The cornerstones of Seamless Flow are IoT enabled passenger interaction points and a single biometric token. A high-efficiency check-in process is required to start the Seamless Flow experience. Here, the traveler will enroll their authenticated document data and their biometric data. This creates a biometric token or a Passenger Data Envelope (PDE) that is continually updated in their journey across the airport. This single biometric identity token can be used in all subsequent checkpoints across the airport up to boarding the plane. The Vision-Box Automated Border Control (ABC) eGates capture a multitude of biometric data—iris, facial, and fingerprint. When this data is used alongside authentic travel documents, it creates a perfect balance between security and ease of access.

Of course, when there’s a large amount of biometric data collected, there will also be concerns regarding a possible privacy or security breach. For the people in the current technological age, privacy has become a top concern with gadgets growing ever more personal. Although many companies are grappling with the issue of convenience versus security, Vision-Box has a different approach in making sure that travelers’ data is kept safe. Using Vision- Box’s hybrid distributed ledger, vb Trustchain, large volumes of information on traveler identity can be stored in a secure blockchain. This segmented distribution will ensure the integrity, privacy, and security of the collected data.

In the foreseeable future, Vision-Box aims to expand its presence in the Asia-Pacific market. More countries have begun to embrace the innovation of Seamless Flow in their airports. In May of 2019, Vision-Box expanded its company footprint into the shores of Japan. In July, the KIA airport in India adopted Seamless Flow technology and is expected to be the largest deployment of an end-to-end paperless biometric program in Asia with over 350 passenger touchpoints. There will always be a need for a hassle-free experience for passengers, and that need requires Vision-Box to constantly improve their technology space. Vision-Box intends to be partners and change-makers in the modernization of airport operations.